- Eliyahu Rips
Eliyahu Rips ( _he. אליהו ריפס; _ru. Илья Рипс) (born
1948 ) - is an Israeli-Latvian mathematician known for his research ingeometric group theory . He achieved public notoriety as a result of coauthoring a paper on theBible codes .Rips grew up in
Latvia (then part ofSoviet Union ). He was the first high school student from Latvia to participate in theInternational Mathematical Olympiad . On13 April 1969 , Rips (who was a 20-year old graduate student at theUniversity of Latvia at that time) attemptedself-immolation in a protest against the Soviet invasion ofCzechoslovakia . After that, he was incarcerated by the Soviet government but, under pressure from Western mathematicians, was allowed to emigrate toIsrael in1972 .After recovering from his wounds and finishing his Ph.D., Rips joined the Department of Mathematics at
Hebrew University ,Jerusalem . Rips received the Erdős prize from the Israel Mathematical Society in1979 and was a sectional speaker at theInternational Congress of Mathematicians in1994 .Rips' (mostly unpublished) work on
group action s on -trees has been widely influential. TheRips machine , in the hands of Rips and his studentZlil Sela , has proven to be effective in obtaining classification results such as a solution to the isomorphism problem forhyperbolic group s.In
1994 , Rips, together withDoron Witztum andYoav Rosenberg , published an article in the journal "Statistical Science" which claimed that they have discovered encoded messages in the Hebrew text of the book ofGenesis , a part ofBible . In1997 , their claim was then described in a popular book "The Bible Code " by journalistMichael Drosnin . Since then,Bible codes have been a subject of controversy and a refutation has been published by mathematicianBrendan McKay and others [http://cs.anu.edu.au/people/bdm/dilugim/torah.html] . However, the methods used to conduct the refutations have been strongly questioned as well (see [http://www.aish.com/seminars/discovery/Codes/Primer/primer1.htm Primer on the Bible Code] , specifically, the section "The McKay... Paper"). See also this paper byDoron Witztum [ [http://www.torahcodes.co.il/emanuel/eman_hb.htm New Statistical Evidence for a Genuine Code in Genesis] ] on the issue.Rips, once an atheist is now an Orthodox Jew [ [http://www.biblecodedigest.com/page.php/26 Bible Code Digest.com - Bible Code Website Links ] ]
elected 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.References
ee also
*
Vietoris–Rips complex External links
* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/biblecodetrans.shtml 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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