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Johann Rudolf Wolf (7 July 1816 – 6 December 1893) was a Switzerland astronomer and mathematician best known for his research on .
Wolf was born in Fällanden, near Zurich. He studied at the universities of Zurich, Vienna, and Berlin. Encke was one of his teachers. Wolf became professor of astronomy at the University of Bern in 1844 and director of the Bern Observatory in 1847. In 1855 he accepted a chair of astronomy at both the University of Zurich and the ETH Zurich in Zurich.
Wolf was greatly impressed by the discovery of the sunspot cycle by Heinrich Schwabe and he not only carried out his own observations, but he collected all the available data on sunspot activity back as far as 1610 and calculated a period for the cycle of 11.1 years. Wolf's estimates of the solar cycle's period appear on p. 250 and p. 251. In 1848 he devised a way of quantifying sunspot activity. The Wolf number, as it is now called, remains in use. In 1852 Wolf was one of four people who discovered the link between the cycle and geomagnetic activity on Earth.
Notices of Wolf's discovery appeared in:
The three other astronomers who observed a relation between the solar cycle and magnetic declination on Earth were:
Around 1850, to study the laws of probability, Wolf performed a Buffon's needle experiment, dropping a needle on a plate 5000 times to verify the value of π, a precursor to the Monte Carlo method.
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