Eliyahu Rips

Eliyahu Rips was born in 1948 in Riga

Rips was born in Riga in 1948 and grew up in Soviet Latvia. His mother was from Riga, and his father Aaron was a Jewish mathematician from Belarus. Many of their relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

He was the first high school student from Latvia to take part in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He went on to study mathematics at the University of Latvia.

In 1969 he set himself on fire in Riga to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Bystanders put out the flames, and he was arrested and held by the Soviet authorities. After international pressure he was freed and allowed to move to Israel.

At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he earned a doctorate and joined the mathematics faculty as a professor. He worked on group theory and developed the Rips machine. He won the Erdős Prize in 1979 and spoke at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994.

In 1994 he co-published a paper claiming coded messages in the Book of Genesis, which became a subject of controversy. He led an Haredi way of life in Jerusalem with his wife Dvorah. He died in 2024.