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.
His PhD supervisor, initially, was Lord Kaldor and, subsequently, and decisively, Richard Goodwin.
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.