He earned his PhD in physics at
UC Berkeley with
Robert Serber as thesis advisor in 1951 and began his career at the
Bell Telephone Laboratories the following year. Wolff and
John Robert Schrieffer developed the
Schrieffer–Wolff transformation in 1966 to solve the
Kondo model. Thereafter Wolff joined the physics department of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1970, becoming head of the
condensed matter and
atomic physics division. In the following years he hired
Marc A. Kastner,
John Joannopoulos and
Robert J. Birgeneau. Together with P. M. Platzman, he coauthored the textbook
Waves and Interactions in Solid State Plasmas in 1973. In 1976 he moved on to the directorship of the
Research Laboratory of Electronics and then of the
Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory in 1981. Wolff left the director's chair in 1987 and retired from his faculty position in 1989 to become a fellow of the newly created
NEC Research Institute at
Princeton University. In 1994 he returned to MIT as the leader of the physics/industry forum for the physics department and remained a professor emeritus. Wolff died of
Alzheimer's disease in 2013. ==References==