Herbert Scarf

Herbert Eli Scarf, born in Philadelphia in 1930 and died in 2015, was an American mathematical economist who became Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. As an undergraduate he placed among the top ten in the 1950 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and he took his doctorate at Princeton in 1954 under Salomon Bochner. His best known contribution is a result in cooperative game theory showing that a core exists for general balanced games, extending earlier work of Lloyd Shapley on games with transferable utility. With Terje Hansen he wrote The Computation of Economic Equilibria, which pioneered numerical algorithms for general equilibrium systems and earned the 1973 Frederick W. Lanchester Award. He belonged to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.