Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Herb Scarf, RIP

Rakesh Vohra memorializes Herb Scarf (1930-2015) with a quote from Horace, and passes along the sad news that Scarf passed away two days ago, on November 15.

Scarf was, as Vohra says, a colossus at the intersection of economics and operations research.

In my small corner of the world, a very important paper was Shapley and Scarf (1974), "On Cores and Indivisibility," published in volume 1 number 1 of the Journal of Mathematical Economics. It built on Scarf's work on the core of games without sidepayments, and introduced a way of thinking about barter for indivisible goods, via the top trading cycle algorithm (which Shapley and Scarf attributed to David Gale).

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Update: see obituraries,
http://economics.yale.edu/news/memory-herbert-e-scarf-july-25-1930-november-15-2015 

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=176545873

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