John Harmon Wolfe

John H. Wolfe passed away peacefully on April 26, 2024 in San Diego, California, after a battle with metastatic cancer. He was 90 years of age. John will be remembered by friends and family for his kindness, tolerance, and personal and professional integrity.

John Wolfe was born on October 10, 1933 in Buenos Aires, Argentina to Wesley and Ruth Wolfe. His father was stationed in Argentina on assignment for a rubber company. A determined student from an early age, John knew he wanted to be a scientist when he was 5 years old. He graduated from Cal Tech in Mathematics in 1955. He earned a master’s degree in Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. His seminal work on cluster analysis, including his 1963 master’s thesis and a related 1965 paper, laid the foundation for what has become the field of model-based clustering.

John applied his research during 30 years working at the U.S. Navy Personnel Research and Development Center in San Diego, with a particular focus on Computer Adaptive Testing. He continued to analyze and publish results from this time for an additional 8 years as an emeritus researcher. He continued to publish his personal research on psychology and scientology into his late 80s.

More about John’s achievements can be found on the Wikipedia page about him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Wolfe.

An annotated list of his publications may be found here: https://johnwolfearticles.wordpress.com/13-2/

John is survived by his life partner of 43 years, Judy Gilson; his brother Wesley Wolfe; and sister Susan Wolfe.

No memorial service is planned.