Kumaraswamy (Vela) Velupillai | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | University of Kyoto University of Lund University of Cambridge |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computable Economics Macroeconomic Theory History of economic thought Philosophy of Economics |
Institutions | University of Trento, Italy New School for Social Research, Italy |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Goodwin |
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. [1]
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.
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.
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 [2] at the University of Trento.
A Festschrift in Vela Velupillai's honour, Computable, Constructive and Behavioural Economic Dynamics, [3] 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.
He lists, in an autobiographical statement, those who have influenced him, in his visions of economics. They are, primarily, the following:
A computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that is well-defined. Common examples of computation are mathematical equation solving and the execution of computer algorithms.
The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in theoretical computer science. Informally, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be quickly solved.
In mathematics, computable numbers are the real numbers that can be computed to within any desired precision by a finite, terminating algorithm. They are also known as the recursive numbers, effective numbers or the computable reals or recursive reals. The concept of a computable real number was introduced by Emile Borel in 1912, using the intuitive notion of computability available at the time.
In computability theory, the Church–Turing thesis is a thesis about the nature of computable functions. It states that a function on the natural numbers can be calculated by an effective method if and only if it is computable by a Turing machine. The thesis is named after American mathematician Alonzo Church and the British mathematician Alan Turing. Before the precise definition of computable function, mathematicians often used the informal term effectively calculable to describe functions that are computable by paper-and-pencil methods. In the 1930s, several independent attempts were made to formalize the notion of computability:
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature, spanning the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world.
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In theoretical computer science and mathematics, the theory of computation is the branch that deals with what problems can be solved on a model of computation, using an algorithm, how efficiently they can be solved or to what degree. The field is divided into three major branches: automata theory and formal languages, computability theory, and computational complexity theory, which are linked by the question: "What are the fundamental capabilities and limitations of computers?".
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"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" is a 1960 article written by the physicist Eugene Wigner, published in Communication in Pure and Applied Mathematics. In it, Wigner observes that a theoretical physics's mathematical structure often points the way to further advances in that theory and to empirical predictions. Mathematical theories often have predictive power in describing nature.
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The history of the Church–Turing thesis ("thesis") involves the history of the development of the study of the nature of functions whose values are effectively calculable; or, in more modern terms, functions whose values are algorithmically computable. It is an important topic in modern mathematical theory and computer science, particularly associated with the work of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing.
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Richard M. Goodwin was an American mathematician and economist.
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Jean-Paul Fitoussi was a French economist and sociologist of Sephardi Jewish descent.
Alain A. Lewis is an American mathematician. A student of the mathematical economist Kenneth Arrow, Lewis is credited by the historian of economics Philip Mirowski with making Arrow aware of computational limits to economic agency.