We prove that, for the binary erasure channel (BEC), the polar-coding paradigm gives rise to codes that not only approach the Shannon limit but do so under the best possible scaling of their block length as a~function of the gap to capacity. This result exhibits the first known family of binary codes that attain both optimal scaling and quasi-linear complexity of encoding and decoding. Our proof is based on the construction and analysis of binary polar codes with large kernels. When communicating reliably at rates within $varepsilon > 0$ of capacity, the code length $n$ often scales as $O(1/varepsilon^{mu})$, where the constant $mu$ is called the scaling exponent. It is known that the optimal scaling exponent is $mu=2$, and it is achieved by random linear codes. The scaling exponent of conventional polar codes (based on the $2times 2$ kernel) on the BEC is $mu=3.63$. This falls far short of the optimal scaling guaranteed by random codes. Our main contribution is a rigorous proof of the following result: for the BEC, there exist $elltimesell$ binary kernels, such that polar codes constructed from these kernels achieve scaling exponent $mu(ell)$ that tends to the optimal value of $2$ as $ell$ grows. We furthermore characterize precisely how large $ell$ needs to be as a function of the gap between $mu(ell)$ and $2$. The resulting binary codes maintain the recursive structure of conventional polar codes, and thereby achieve construction complexity $O(n)$ and encoding/decoding complexity $O(nlog n)$.
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