Eliyahu Rips

Eliyahu Rips
File:EliaRips.jpg
Born	December 1948 (age 75) Latvia
Nationality	Israeli
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Hebrew University
Alma mater	University of Latvia Hebrew University
Doctoral advisor	Shimshon Amitsur
Doctoral students	Lev Birbrair Zlil Sela
Known for	Rips machine Vietoris–Rips complex Torah Code
Notable awards	Erdős Prize (1979)

Eliyahu Rips, also Ilya Rips (Hebrew: אליהו ריפס‎; Russian: Илья Рипс; Latvian: Iļja Ripss; born 12 December 1948) is a Latvian-born Israeli mathematician known for his research in geometric group theory. He became known to the general public following his coauthoring a paper on what is popularly known as Bible code, the supposed coded messaging in the Hebrew text of the Torah.

Biography

Rips grew up in Latvia (then part of Soviet Union). He was the first high school student from Latvia to participate in the International Mathematical Olympiad. In January 1969 he learnt from listening to Western radio broadcast---then illegal in the USSR---of the self-immolation of Czechoslovak student Jan Palach. On 13 April 1969, Rips, then a graduate student at the University of Latvia, attempted self-immolation in a protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After unwrapping a self-made slogan condemning the occupation of Czechoslovakia he lit a candle and set his gasoline-soaked cloths ablaze. A group of bystanders were able to quickly put the fire out, resulting only in burns to Rips' neck and hands. Though injured, he was first taken to the local KGB office and interrogated. The secret service wanted to make sure he was not a member of a group of would-be self-immolators. He was then incarcerated by the Soviet government for two years. It was only after his story spread among Western mathematical circles and a following wave of petitions by Western mathematicians that Rips was freed in 1971. The following year, under further protests by mathematicians in the U.S., he was allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1972.

After recovering from his wounds and finishing his Ph.D., Rips joined the Department of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in 1975 completed his Ph.D. in mathematics there. His topic was the dimensional subgroup problem. His dissertation was recognized as being of international interest and he was awarded with the prestigious Aharon Karzir Prize. In 1979, Rips received the Erdős Prize from the Israel Mathematical Society, and was a sectional speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994.

Since completing his Ph.D., Rips has been on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at Hebrew University where he holds the position of Professor. His current research interests concentrate on geometric and combinatorial methods in infinite group theory. This includes small cancellation theory and its generalizations, (Gromov) hyperbolic group theory, Bass-Serre theory and the actions of groups on $\mathbb R$-trees.

Rips' (mostly unpublished) work on group actions on $\mathbb R$-trees has been widely influential. The Rips machine, in the hands of Rips and his student Zlil Sela, has proven to be effective in obtaining classification results such as a solution to the isomorphism problem for hyperbolic groups.

The Bible Code controversy

In the late seventies, Rips began looking with the help of a computer for codes in the Torah. In 1994, Rips, together with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, published an article in the journal Statistical Science, "Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis", which claimed the discovery of encoded messages in the Hebrew text of Genesis. This, in turn, was the inspiration for the 1997 book The Bible Code by journalist Michael Drosnin. While Rips originally claimed that he agreed with Drosnin's findings, he later distanced himself from his interpretations. Since Drosnin's book, Bible codes have been a subject of controversy, with the claims being criticized by Brendan McKay and others. An early supporter of Rips' theories was Robert Aumann, Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics 2005, who headed a commission overseeing Rips' experiments attempting to prove the existence of a secret code from God in the Torah. Eventually, Aumann abandoned the idea and withdrew his support from Rips.

References

• Grūtups, A. (2009). Observators. Rīga: Atēna.

External links

• The Bible Code, transcript of a story which aired on BBC Two, Thursday 20 November 2003, featuring comments by Drosnin, Rips, and Brendan McKay.
• Eliyahu Rips at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Eliyahu Rips's results at the International Mathematical Olympiad