Eliyahu Rips - Biography

Eliyahu Rips, also Ilya Rips (Илья Рипс; born 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 the Torah Code.

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. On 9 April 1969, Rips (who was a 20-year old graduate student at the University of Latvia at that time) attempted self-immolation in a protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After that, he was incarcerated by the Soviet government for two years but, under pressure from Western mathematicians, 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. In 1975, he completed his PhD in mathematics at Hebrew University. His topic was the dimensional sub-group 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 PhD, he 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 R-trees.

Rips' (mostly unpublished) work on group actions on <math>\mathbb R</math>-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 was the first researcher to make a modern systematic study of the Codes of the Torah in a computer, focusing on the beginning of the Book of Genesis: Rips is the founder of the modern systematic research of Codes in the Torah. In the early eighties, Doron Witztum started to work together with Rips, producing a stream of remarkable findings. In 1994, Rips, together with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, published an article in the journal Statistical Science which claimed that they have discovered encoded messages in the Hebrew text of the Book of Genesis, a part of Bible. In 1997, their claim was then described in a popular book The Bible Code by journalist Michael Drosnin. Rips distanced himself from the interpretations of Drosnin in a public statement. Since Drosnin's book, Bible codes have been a subject of controversy, with the claims being criticized by Brendan McKay and others.

Personal life

Rips, once an atheist is now an Orthodox Jew.

Selected papers

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

External links

• Torah Codes and 2012
• The Bible Code, transcript of a story which aired on BBC Two, Thursday 20 November 2003, featuring comments by Drosnin, Rips, and Brendan McKay.
• A photo of Professor Eliyahu Rips