Eliyahu Rips
Eliyahu Rips (also Ilya Rips, Hebrew אליהו ריפס; * 1948 ) is an Israeli professor of mathematics. Rips is to have discovered through his work in group theory, as well as the controversial Bible Code, he said, along with Doron Witztum known.
Life
Rips grew up in the former Soviet Union in Latvia. As the first students of Latvia, he participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad ( IMO).
1969 Rips was arrested shortly after completing his studies at the University of Latvia, because he protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia with a self-immolation attempt. Spent two years as a political prisoner Rips. Here he introduced the legend group-theoretical investigations on toilet paper, since it no real paper was granted. After intervention of Western mathematicians Rips was finally released in 1971 and emigrated in 1972 to Israel, where he teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to this day.
In addition to professorships at the Universities of Chicago and Berkeley, the mathematician with a doctorate also received the Erdös Prize by the Israeli Mathematical Union in 1979.
Partly with his doctoral 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).
1994 an article appeared in the magazine Statistical Science, in the Rips reported together with Doron Witztum and Yoav Rosenberg about the discovery allegedly coded messages in the Torah. Through the book The Bible Code Michael Drosnin of the journalists, from which Rips, Witztum and Rosenberg distance, the disputed discovery became known worldwide.
According to other renowned statistician, the results of the Bible codes are not statistically significant.
Rips is charedischer Jew who considers Einstein's preoccupation with physics and profane sciences primarily as a "loss". He commented in an interview in 2010: "I come from the world of science and know what mean intellectual achievements. I understand what is meant by the Academy, and still say that there is nothing more important than the Torah in the world. And even more: The Jewish people consider geniuses like Einstein as a world blessing of successful Jews. I consider them as a loss. The world has lost these immense forces that the Torah had been able to devote. Imagine that spiritual forces may exist in the world if Einstein had devoted his life to Torah " ..