William Korchinski

Bill Korchinski would want the facts first.

Bill was born on August 9, 1953 in Deep River, Ontario, Canada to Lucy and Larry Korchinski. He died of pancreatic cancer at home in Santa Barbara, California on November 11, 2021.

His family would want you to know that he lived well, he died nobly, and he was loved by those who knew him.

Bill grew up in several big cities in Canada and the U.S., which he stopped naming because people’s eyes glazed over around Winnipeg. He graduated with a degree in Chemical Engineering from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1975. He earned his Master’s in Chemical Engineering from McGill University in 1979. At a house party one night in Kingston, he met Cynthia Withers. He fell in love with her within half an hour. They married in 1979.

Bill and Cynthia moved with their young sons, Alex and Scott, to Santa Barbara in 1992. He founded Advanced Industrial Modeling in 2002. He ran it from an office in the Montecito Upper Village until his retirement in 2019. If you saw him in the area, he was almost certainly wearing sunglasses and shorts.

Bill had eclectic and wide-ranging interests. He played drums in his garage. He sent emails with the subject line: “Good man here.” He was just as likely to use his brainpower to create algorithms as he was to reverse engineer solutions to his kids’ computer games. He read extensively, and would have appreciated that he died on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. When he said, “I’m going to go take a look at the stars,” that meant that either the Geminids were near, or that he was enjoying the simple luxury of taking a pee outside.

Bill also painted Converse shoes. He once painted a painting onto a shoe. And then he painted a painting of the painting on the shoes. After his terminal cancer diagnosis, he also painted a pair of shoes with his friends in his backyard at his Celebration of Life (“Chill with Bill”). He painted his last pair of shoes with his son, Scott, at Serenity House in Santa Barbara.

He is survived by his wife Cynthia Withers, his sons Alex and Scott Korchinski, and his siblings David, Karen, and Jim Korchinski.