Аfire

When he was twenty, Ilya (Elijahu) Rips, a mathematics student at the University of Latvia, tried to burn himself alive in central Riga. It was a protest against Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. Now, for more than forty years he has been living in Israel; he is an orthodox Jew and considered one of the most acclaimed and original mathematicians in the world. Yet he doesn’t know the limit in his scientific work either. Rips’ attempts to decipher hidden messages in the Holy Scripture continue to divide both scientific as well as religious communities.