Eliyahu rep

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Elia Rips (2008)

Eliyahu Rips (also Ilya Rips ; Hebrew אליהו ריפס; *  December 12, 1948 in Riga ) is an Israeli professor of mathematics . Rips is known for his work in group theory and for the controversial Bible code , which he believed to have discovered together with Doron Witztum.

Life

Rips grew up in Latvia in what was then the Soviet Union . He was the first student in Latvia to take part in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

After completing his studies at the University of Latvia , Rips was drafted into military service. In 1969 he was arrested for protesting against the invasion of Czechoslovakia with a self-immolation attempt at the Statue of Liberty in Riga. Rips spent two years as a political prisoner. Here, according to legend, he carried out group theoretical investigations on toilet paper, as no real paper was granted to him. After the intervention of Western mathematicians, Rips was finally released in 1971 and emigrated to Israel in 1972, where he still teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem .

In addition to professorships at the universities of Chicago and Berkeley, the mathematician also received the Erdős Prize from the Israeli Mathematical Union in 1979.

Partly with his doctoral student Zlil Sela , he made important contributions to geometric group theory. In 1994 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich ( Cyclic splittings of finitely presented groups and the canonical JSJ decomposition ).

In 1994 an article appeared in Statistical Science magazine in which Rips, together with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg, reported the discovery of allegedly encoded messages in the Torah . The controversial discovery became world-famous through the book The Bible Code by the journalist Michael Drosnin , from which Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg distance themselves.

According to other renowned statisticians, the results of the Bible Code are not statistically significant.

Rips is a Charedian Jew who regards Einstein's preoccupation with physics and profane sciences primarily as a “loss”. In a 2010 interview he said: “I come from the world of science and I know what intellectual success means. I understand what is meant by academy, and yet I say that there is nothing more important in the world than the Torah. And what's more, people see Jewish geniuses like Einstein as a world blessing for successful Jews. I consider it a loss. The world has lost these immeasurable powers that could have been devoted to the Torah. Imagine what spiritual forces could exist in the world if Einstein had dedicated his life to the Torah ” .

Fonts (selection)

  • Cyclic splittings of finitely presented groups and the canonical JSJ decomposition. Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. 1, 2 (Zurich, 1994), 595-600, Birkhäuser, Basel, 1995.
  • with Zlil Sela : Canonical representatives and equations in hyperbolic groups. Invent. Math. 120 (1995) no. 3, 489-512.
  • with Sela: Cyclic splittings of finitely presented groups and the canonical JSJ decomposition. Ann. of Math. (2) 146 (1997) no. 1, 53-109.
  • with Mark Sapir , J.-C. Birget: Isoperimetric and isodiametric functions of groups. Ann. of Math. (2) 156 (2002), no. 2, 345-466.
  • with Birget, Olshanski , Sapir: Isoperimetric functions of groups and computational complexity of the word problem. Ann. of Math. (2) 156 (2002), no. 2, 467-518.

Web links

documentary

  • Eliyahu Rips: The Burning ( Elijahu Rips. Degošais ), director: Jānis Putniņš , Latvia, 2014

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 12, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Reminder page of the University of Latvia (accessed August 8, 2015) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / vesture.lu.lv
  2. ↑ Interview in the Mischpacha newspaper , quoted here from Die Jüdische Zeitung 46/2010, Zurich, November 19, 2010, page 10.
  3. ↑ http://nkc.gov.lv/en/get-to-know-a-film/coming-soon/documentaries-coming-soon/eliyahu-rips-burning/
personal data
SURNAME Rips, Eliyahu
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rips, Ilya
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga