Herbert Scarf - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Scarf was born on July 25, 1930, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to parents of Ukrainian Jewish origins. His father Louis Harris Scarf immigrated to the United States in 1905 from Ukraine at the age of 18 and his mother Lena Elkman also came to the US in the same year at the age of 5. They married in 1929 and had two twin sons next year: Frederick Leonard Scarf and Herbert Eli Scarf. Herbert and Frederick went to the same public primary and high schools in Philadelphia. Herbert Scarf became very interested in mathematics in his early adolescence after reading the book: Men of Mathematics by E.T.Bell. He began to read calculus, geometry, number theory and theoretical mechanics by himself in high school. Herbert’s teachers at the South Philadelphia High School apparently did not know he had such avid mathematical interests, and were astonished when he was ranked first in the Pennsylvania Statewide Mathematical Tournament for high school students organized by Temple University in 1947.

Herbert Scarf and his brother Frederick went to Temple University in 1948 for their undergraduate education. During their undergraduate studies, they lived with their parents and commuted by subway between their parents’ house and the university. Their father had a small business but was hit badly by the Great Depression and did not quite recover from it.

At Temple University, Herbert Scarf chose mathematics as his major subject. He started to attend graduate courses on Real and Complex Variables, Analysis, Probability Theory, and Statistics in his sophomore year. He vividly remembers one of the faculty members of the mathematics department, Professor Marie Wurster, who was very kind to him, always encouraged him and spent an enormous amount of time talking to him about mathematical topics. In 1950, he placed in the top 10 of the 1950 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the major mathematics competition among universities in the United States and Canada.

In the fall of 1951, Herbert Scarf got a scholarship from Princeton University and went there for his graduate training in mathematics, whereas his brother Frederick went to MIT for graduate study in physics. Frederick ultimately became a distinguished space scientist – he unfortunately died in Moscow at the early age of 57.

Among Scarf’s many classmates at Princeton were Ralph E. Gomory, Lloyd Shapley, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Serge Lang and John Milnor. He also met Martin Shubik who was then a graduate student at the Department of Economics. At that time John Nash and Harold Kuhn had already left Princeton, but Scarf often saw them during their regular returns. At Princeton, Scarf became a close friend of Gomory – they remain friends after these many years and often meet each other. When Scarf was at Princeton, he did not study game theory or economics but knew Martin Shubik, Lloyd Shapley, and John Nash who were actively involved in the early development of game theory.

After World War II, Princeton had become a sanctuary for a large number of world leading scientists who had escaped from Nazi occupied Europe. Among them were Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Kurt Gödel. Scarf often saw Einstein strolling with Gödel from Einstein’s office at the Institute for Advanced Studies to his house on Mercer Street. Einstein always smiled benignly but his friend Gödel rarely did.

Scarf published his first scientific article ``Group invariant integration and the fundamental theorem of algebra” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in May, 1952. He attended Professor Saloman Bochner’s lectures about Haar Measure on Compact Topological Groups. One day Scarf made a sudden connection between this topic and a quite distant theme that he had been thinking about for quite some time. As a result he proposed an entirely novel proof for the fundamental theorem of algebra, stating that every polynomial in a single variable has at least one complex root.

Scarf’s academic adviser was Salomon Bochner. Scarf admired Bochner and maintained a good relationship with him until his death in 1982. Other professors in the Department of Mathematics were Emil Artin, William Feller, Ralph Fox, Solomon Lefschetz and Albert Tucker. Scarf wrote his PhD dissertation on partial differential equations over manifolds and received his PhD in 1954.