Herbert Eli "Herb" Scarf (July 25, 1930 – November 15, 2015) was an American mathematical economist and

Sterling Professor Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a Academic tenure in North America, tenured faculty member considered the best in their field. It is akin to the rank of distinguished professor at other universities. ...

Economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

Education and career

Scarf was born in Philadelphia, the son of Jewish emigrants from Ukraine and Russia, Lene (Elkman) and Louis Scarf. During his undergraduate work he finished in the top 10 of the 1950

William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, often abbreviated to Putnam Competition, is an annual list of mathematics competitions, mathematics competition for undergraduate college students enrolled at institutions of higher learning in th ...

, the major mathematics competition between universities across the United States and

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1954, supervised by

Salomon Bochner Salomon Bochner (20 August 1899 – 2 May 1982) was a Galizien-born mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry. Life He was born into a Jewish family in Podgórze (near Kraków), th ...

Contributions

Among his notable works is a seminal paper in cooperative game in which he showed sufficiency for a core in general balanced games. Sufficiency and necessity had been previously shown by

Lloyd Shapley Lloyd Stowell Shapley (; June 2, 1923 – March 12, 2016) was an American mathematician and Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist. He contributed to the fields of mathematical economics and especially game theory. Shapley is generally conside ...

for games where players were allowed to transfer utility between themselves freely. Necessity is shown to be lost in the generalization.

Recognition

Scarf received the 1973 Frederick W. Lanchester Award for his contribution ''The Computation of Economic Equilibria'' with the collaboration of Terje Hansen, which pioneered the use of numeric

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

s to solve

general equilibrium In economics, general equilibrium theory attempts to explain the behavior of supply, demand, and prices in a whole economy with several or many interacting markets, by seeking to prove that the interaction of demand and supply will result in an ov ...

systems using Applied general equilibrium models. He was a member of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

, the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

, and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...

, and was elected to the 2002 class of

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

s of the

Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international society for practitioners in the fields of operations research Operations research () (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often s ...

References

External links

Personal web site

{{DEFAULTSORT:Scarf, Herbert 1930 births 2015 deaths Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences General equilibrium theorists 20th-century American economists 21st-century American economists 20th-century American mathematicians Yale University faculty Fellows of the Econometric Society Presidents of the Econometric Society Yale Sterling Professors John von Neumann Theory Prize winners Distinguished fellows of the American Economic Association Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences 21st-century American mathematicians Members of the American Philosophical Society