Wolf was born in 1935 in Newark, New Jersey, and graduated from Weequahic High School in 1952.
[1] He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1956 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1960 for his thesis "On the Detection and Estimation Problem for Multiple Nonstationary Random Processes".
He held faculty appointments at New York University 1963–1965, the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 1965–1973 and the University of Massachusetts Amherst 1973–1984, and worked at RCA Laboratories and Bell Laboratories.
In 1984, he joined the University of California, San Diego, where he applied communication and information theory to magnetic storage.
He was president of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1974.