Herb Scarf | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Herbert Eli Scarf (1930-07-25)July 25, 1930 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | November 15, 2015(2015-11-15) (aged 85) Sag Harbor, New York, U.S. |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Temple University (BA) Princeton University (MA,PhD) |
| Doctoral advisor | Salomon Bochner |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Economics,Mathematics |
| Institutions | Yale University |
| Doctoral students | |
| Awards | John von Neumann Theory Prize(1983) |
| Website | |
Herbert Eli "Herb" Scarf (July 25, 1930 – November 15, 2015) was an Americanmathematical economist andSterling Professor ofEconomics atYale University.
Scarf was born in Philadelphia, the son of Jewish emigrants from Ukraine and Russia, Lene (Elkman) and Louis Scarf.[1] He had a twin brother, noted space physicistFrederick L. Scarf.[2] During his undergraduate work he finished in the top 10 of the 1950William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the major mathematics competition between universities across the United States andCanada. He received his PhD from Princeton in 1954, supervised bySalomon Bochner.[3]
Among his notable works is a seminal paper incooperative game in which he showed sufficiency for acore in general balanced games. Sufficiency and necessity had been previously shown byLloyd Shapley for games where players were allowed to transfer utility between themselves freely. Necessity is shown to be lost in the generalization.
Scarf received the 1973 Frederick W. Lanchester Award for his contributionThe Computation of Economic Equilibria with the collaboration of Terje Hansen, which pioneered the use of numericalgorithms to solvegeneral equilibrium systems usingApplied general equilibrium models.He was a member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, theNational Academy of Sciences, and theAmerican Philosophical Society, and was elected to the 2002 class ofFellows of theInstitute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.[4][5][6][7]
