Herbert E. Scarf (Temple 1951, PBK 2003)

Herbert E. Scarf, Ph.D., is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
But the Temple University Class of 1951 alumnus was not a member of Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), the oldest national honor society in the country—at least, not until last week.
Temple bestowed the long overdue honor upon Scarf, 72, by inducting him as an alumnus member during the University’s Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony last Wednesday. He also addressed the 100 juniors and seniors who were inducted into this year’s class of PBK.
“ He’s one of our most distinguished alumni,” said Frank Thornton, a professor of mathematics at Temple and faculty adviser to the University’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Temple did not have a chapter of the honor society until 1974—23 years after Scarf graduated.
“ I’ve been at Temple since 1964,” said Thornton. “I worked back then with the honors students in the math department. Marie Wurster was also a professor and director of the undergraduate mathematics program—she had been at Temple since 1946—and every time I talked about my top students, she would always talk about Herbert Scarf.”
Wurster, now 85 and retired from Temple, was also at the ceremony to help honor her former student.
As a student at Temple, Scarf, who pioneered the use of numeric algorithms to facilitate the “computation” of equilibrium in general equilibrium systems, placed in the top 10 of the 1950 Mathematical Association of America’s William Lowell Putnam Competition, an annual math contest for college students across North America established in 1938.
Following his graduation from Temple, Scarf went on to Princeton University, where he earned his master’s (1952) and doctorate (1954) in mathematics. While at Princeton, he published his first paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“ Most scientists don’t even get published in the Proceedings and he did it as a graduate student,” said Thornton.
Following Princeton, Scarf worked for the Rand Corporation from 1954-57 before joining the statistics faculty at Stanford University. In 1963, he was appointed a professor of economics at Yale.
Scarf has served as director of the Cowles Foundation at Yale, director of the Division of Social Sciences at Yale, chairman of the section of Economic Sciences at the National Academy of Sciences, and as a research scholar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Ca.
Since its chapter was founded in 1974, 1,273 Temple students have been initiated into Phi Beta Kappa. Open only to students in the arts and sciences, Temple seniors must have a minimum grade point average of 3.5, have taken at least one semester of a foreign language at the intermediate level, and have taken a wide scope of courses to be considered for PBK induction. Juniors must have a GPA of 3.85 or better to be eligible.
— Preston Moretz, News and Media Relations
 

Temple alumnus Herbert E. Scarf (center) returned to campus last week to be inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. Joining him at the Diamond Club before the ceremony were professor emerita Charlotte Phelps, who was associated with Scarf at Yale, and math professor Frank Thornton, president of Temple’s PBK chapter.

From Temple Times Online 29 May 2003
http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/5-29-03/scarf.html