  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.
