Ari Ariyawansa, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and former Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Washington State University (WSU), passed away in April 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Ari was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and grew up there, receiving his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Sri Lanka, Peradeniya. He continued his graduate education at the University of Toronto, Canada in the Department of Industrial Engineering and was awarded the doctoral degree in 1983. His thesis advisor was Professor J. G. C. Templeton.
In the fall of 1983, Ari joined the WSU Department of Mathematics and rose through the ranks to full professor in 1995. His research expertise was in operations research and computational optimization with an emphasis on stochastic programming models. His research was on the cutting edge, and his papers were published in top rated mathematics journals. Ari was a reputed scholar in the area of collinear scaling algorithms for convex minimax problems and was a sought-after speaker at numerous national and international conferences. His research collaborators included well known optimization researchers, such as professors Danny Sorensen and Roger Wets. In addition, Ari was extremely successful in garnering external funds to support his work from U.S. Army Research and the Department of Energy (DOE).
Ari was the chair of the WSU Department of Mathematics from 2008 to 2013. He was a quiet gentleman but navigated the department safely through some of the budget challenges at WSU. He never lost the focus on elevating the department’s research profile in terms of external grant funds and published research. Ari was very supportive of junior faculty achieving their academic goals.
During his time at WSU, Ari also spent a sabbatical at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. Further, Ari trained nine PhDs and eight master’s students, who have gone on to become scholars and department chairs in the U.S. and overseas.
Ari Ariyawansa’s passing is a loss for the mathematics optimization community, his family, friends, colleagues, and research collaborators.