Herbert Eli "Herb" Scarf (July 25, 1930 – November 15, 2015) was an American mathematical economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University.

[1] During his undergraduate work he finished in the top 10 of the 1950 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, the major mathematics competition between universities across the United States and Canada.

He received his PhD from Princeton in 1954, supervised by Salomon Bochner.

Sufficiency and necessity had been previously shown by Lloyd Shapley for games where players were allowed to transfer utility between themselves freely.

Scarf received the 1973 Frederick W. Lanchester Award for his contribution The Computation of Economic Equilibria with the collaboration of Terje Hansen, which pioneered the use of numeric algorithms to solve general equilibrium systems using Applied general equilibrium models.