He spent his youth in Heidelberg, where he passed the Abitur examination in 1980 at the Kurfürst-Friedrich-Gymnasium Heidelberg [de]. He studied mathematics and physics in Geneva and Bonn and received his Promotion (PhD) in 1988 from the University of Hamburg. His PhD dissertation Universelle versus relative Einhüllende: Eine geometrische Untersuchung von Quotienten von universellen Einhüllenden halbeinfacher Lie-Algebren (Universal versus relative envelopes: a geometric investigation of quotients of universal envelopes of semi-simple Lie algebras) was supervised by Jens Carsten Jantzen.^[1] After postdoctoral positions at U. C. Berkeley, Harvard University, and MIT, Soergel completed his Habilitation at the University of Bonn in 1991. In 1994 he was appointed to a professorial chair at the University of Freiburg. He was an invited speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. Since 2008 he has been a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.^[2]

He is the author or coauthor of over 30 research articles.^[3] His research in representation theory has important applications to Kazhdan-Lusztig theory and Koszul duality. The category of Soergel bimodules is named in his honor.^[4][5]

His doctoral students include Peter Fiebig, Catharina Stroppel and Geordie Williamson.^[1]

Wolfgang Soergel is the son of the physicist Volker Soergel [de] and a grandson of the paleontologist Johannes Wolfgang Adolf Werner Soergel [de] (1887–1946).

• Langlands’ Philosophy and Koszul Duality. In: I. Klaus W. Roggenkamp, Mirela Ștefănescu (ed.): Algebra – representation theory. (Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Algebra – Representation Theory, Constanta, Romania, 2–12 August 2000) (= NATO Science Series. Series 2: Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry. 28). Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht u. a. 2001, ISBN 0-7923-7113-5, pp. 379–414.
• with Alexander Beilinson, Victor Ginzburg: Koszul duality patterns in representation theory. In: Journal of the American Mathematical Society. vol. 9, no. 2, 1996, pp. 473–527, doi:10.1090/S0894-0347-96-00192-0.
• Gradings on Representation Categories. In: Srishti D. Chatterji (ed.): Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. August 3–11, 1994, Zürich, Switzerland. vol. 2. Basel etc., Birkhäuser 1995, ISBN 3-7643-5153-5, pp. 800–806.
• with Henning H. Andersen, Jens C. Jantzen: Representations of quantum groups at a ${\displaystyle p}$ -th root of unity and of semisimple groups in characteristic ${\displaystyle p}$ : independence of ${\displaystyle p}$  (= Astérisque. 220, ISSN 0303-1179). Société Mathématique de France, Paris 1994.
• Kategorie 𝓞, perverse Garben, und Moduln über den Koinvarianten zur Weylgruppe. In: Journal of the American Mathematical Society. vol. 3, no. 2, 1990, pp. 421–445, doi:10.1090/S0894-0347-1990-1029692-5.