Partial Coherence in modern optics: Emil Wolf's legacy in the 21st century

We highlight the impact of Emil Wolf’s work on coherence and polarization on an ever increasing amount of applications in the 21 st century. We present a brief review of how partial coherence at the level of increasing order of coherence functions is leading to evolution in the better methods for microscopy, imaging, optical coherence tomography; speckle imaging; propagation through random media. This evolution in our capabilities is expected to have wide ramifications in Science and Engineering.