Eliyahu Rips, also Ilya Rips (Hebrew: אליהו ריפס; Russian: Илья Рипс; born 1948) is a Latvian born Israeli mathematician known for his research in geometric group theory. He achieved public notoriety as a result of coauthoring a paper on the Bible codes.
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. Rips received the Erdős prize from the Israel Mathematical Society in 1979 and was a sectional speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994.
Rips' (mostly unpublished) work on group actions on 
-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.
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The Bible Code controversy
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.[1] Since Drosnin's book, Bible codes have been a subject of controversy and a refutation has been criticized by Brendan McKay and others [2].
Rips, once an atheist is now an Orthodox Jew[2]
Selected papers
- E. Rips, Group actions on R-trees, preprint
- E. Rips, Subgroups of small cancellation groups. Bull. London Math. Soc. 14 (1982), no. 1, 45—47.
- Rips, E.; Sela, Z. Structure and rigidity in hyperbolic groups. I. Geom. Funct. Anal. 4 (1994), no. 3, 337—371.
- Rips, E. Sela, Z. Canonical representatives and equations in hyperbolic groups. Invent. Math. 120 (1995), no. 3, 489—512.
- Rips, E.; Sela, Z. Cyclic splittings of finitely presented groups and the canonical JSJ decomposition. Ann. of Math. (2) 146 (1997), no. 1, 53—109.
- Sapir, Mark V.; Birget, Jean-Camille; Rips, Eliyahu, Isoperimetric and isodiametric functions of groups. Ann. of Math. (2) 156 (2002), no. 2, 345—466.
- Birget, J.-C.; Ol'shanskii, A. Yu.; Rips, E.; Sapir, M. V., Isoperimetric functions of groups and computational complexity of the word problem. Ann. of Math. (2) 156 (2002), no. 2, 467—518.
See also
References
- ^ [1] Public Statement by Dr. Rips on Michael Drosnin's theories
- ^ Bible Code Digest.com - Bible Code Website Links
- 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.
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