Kumaraswamy (Vela) Velupillai (born 1947) is an academic economist and a Senior Visiting Professor at the Madras School of Economics and was, formerly, (Distinguished) Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Professore di Chiara Fama in the Department of Economics at the University of Trento, Italy.

Current work

His work is almost entirely devoted to Computable Economics, Macroeconomic Theory and the History and Philosophy of Economics. Within Computable Economics, his major focus has been an attempt to mathematize economic theory—both micro and macro theory—using the methods of recursion theory and constructive mathematics.

Education

His high school education was at Royal College Colombo. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan; he obtained a master's degree in economics at the Department of Economics, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden and a PhD in economics at Cambridge University (King's College). His PhD supervisor, initially, was Lord Kaldor and, subsequently, and decisively, Richard Goodwin.

Academic posts

He has held tenured and visiting appointments at the European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy, UCLA, the People's University in Beijing and several other European Universities and Research Institutions. He is the founder of the Algorithmic Social Sciences Research Unit at the University of Trento. A Festschrift in Vela Velupillai's honour, Computable, Constructive and Behavioural Economic Dynamics, edited by Stefano Zambelli, was published by Routledge. A Special Issue of the journal New Mathematics and Natural Computation, edited by Shu-Heng, in honour of Vela Velupillai, was published in March 2012.

Influences

He lists, in an autobiographical statement, those who have influenced him, in his visions of economics. They are, primarily, the following:

Key books

Main articles

International Awards, Fellowships, Memberships & Prizes

Distinguished students