Book excerpt: Wolf's contributions to optical physics go far beyond his co-writing, with Max Born, the classic Principles of Optics. He introduced spatial coherence, he was the first to describe Gabor's holography, and his work has served as the foundation of about 250 companies and corporate divisions in the English-speaking world. In these 23 essays, two of which are tributes to the life of Wolf, contributors consider aspects of his work such as the polarization of light, the electromagnetic theory of optical coherence, wave descriptions of optical measurements, holographic microscopy, optical physics and psychology, the Wolf effect and the Wolf shift, optical pathlength spectroscopy, the diffractive multifocal focusing effect, phase and information, holography, internal reflection tomography, and nano- optics. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).