Eliyahu Rips - Biography

Biography

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, then a graduate student at the University of Latvia, 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. In 1975, he completed his PhD in mathematics at Hebrew University. His topic was the dimensional sub-group problem. His dissertation was recognized as being of international interest and he was awarded with the prestigious Aharon Karzir Prize. In 1979, Rips received the Erdős Prize from the Israel Mathematical Society, and was a sectional speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994.

Since completing his PhD, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics, at Hebrew University where he holds the position of Professor. His current research interests concentrate on geometric and combinatorial methods in infinite group theory. This includes small cancellation theory and its generalizations, (Gromov) hyperbolic group theory, Bass-Serre theory and the actions of groups on R-trees.

Rips' (mostly unpublished) work on group actions on -trees has been widely influential.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.