| Richard
S. Ellis Purposes
Springfield,
MA  | | Richard
Ellis |
|  | Ellis
Family
left to right:
wife Alison, Michael,
Melissa, Richard,
mother-in-law Rose |
Since
I am blessed with a beautiful family, let me start by telling you about them.
Our daughter Melissa is now a second-year resident in pediatrics at New York Presbyterian
Hospital, having graduated from Yale University and Yale Medical School. Our son
Michael also graduated from Yale University and is now an associate at a management
consulting firm in New York. My
wife Alison is a first grade teacher. When I first met her in high school, her
gentle smile pierced the shell encasing my adolescent soul. It didn't take long
for me to fall in love with her. In 1969 I graduated from Harvard University,
where I had pursued a double major in Mathematics and German Literature. A month
later, Alison and I married. Living with her has changed my life immeasurably
by opening me up to my emotionality, to the beauty of silence, and to a spirituality
that in my youth I never knew existed. Without her, I wouldn't have become the
person I am now. There
is a direct link between my teaching in the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School
and Melissa's wedding in May 2000. The announcement of her wedding in The New
York Times was seen by the wife of Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, director of Jewish
education and the FMAMS at the Springfield Jewish Community Center. When she read
that Melissa's father was an adjunct professor of Judaic studies at the University
of Massachusetts, she called this to the attention of Rabbi Perlman, who later
invited me to teach "Purposes of Jewish Living." With
great enthusiasm I accepted the invitation to teach in the Mini-School, hoping
that my participation would enable me to share with adult learners my passion
for Jewish texts. Teaching "Purposes of Jewish Living" has fulfilled
every expectation. By encouraging active student participation and by emphasizing
that the Torah is not only the source of our religion but also a masterful literary
text open to multiple interpretations, I have tried to create a relaxed and supportive
atmosphere in which both students and teacher learn from one another. If
in 1969 it had been possible to see the future, I wouldn't have been surprised
to learn that 30-plus years later I would be a professor of mathematics. Not only
had mathematics always fascinated me since childhood, but also I had an excellent
teacher, my father, may his memory be a blessing. But that in addition I would
be an adjunct professor of Judaic studies and that I would be teaching a course
entitled "Purposes of Jewish Living" would have shocked me. How
did I get to the place where I am now, my Jewish identity having been stillborn
in the preconscious, Garden of Eden years of my youth? More than 20 years after
I had expelled myself from that garden to wander and to search, my Jewish identity
took seed and flourished when, for reasons I don't understand—my life until
that point having prepared me in no way for this gift of consciousness expansion
and identity transformation—I discovered Israel. There my family and I lived
three times during the 1980s and there the Torah discovered me, leading me to
the beginnings of my path back to the Tree of Life, a path I am still exploring. I
grew up surrounded by Jews in the Blue Hill Avenue section of Boston, within easy
walking distance of one Conservative and four Orthodox synagogues. Born into an
Orthodox home, the religious life of which I did not participate in, living a
preconscious Jewish existence without ever understanding it, I decided to truncate
my Jewish education after four years. After my bar mitzvah and for the next two
decades, Judaism to me was a closed society consisting mostly of old men who mumbled
prayers in an incomprehensible language. During college and for years thereafter,
I wanted to be as far away from that society as possible. My one link to Judaism
was the poisoned dagger of the Shoah, which gashed a gaping wound in my soul that
has never healed. I
received my Ph.D. from New York University and had my first academic job at Northwestern
University in Evanston, IL. Then our link to eternity: our first child was born.
I began teaching in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University
of Massachusetts, while Alison stayed home to raise Melissa. We also joined the
Jewish Community of Amherst, where I reluctantly went to High Holy Day services
and, during one year in the late 1970s, actually enjoyed the guitar-strumming
cantor. It was my first positive synagogue experience ever. In
the spring of 1981, at the bat mitzvah of our niece, I overheard a friend talking
about her daughter and about the wonders of Israel, where her daughter lived.
I had a sabbatical coming up, and on the spur of the moment my wife and I decided
to go to Israel, although we knew no one there. In the summer of that year, I
found a visiting position at the Technion in Haifa. Through
our 10,000 kilometers of travel in Israel in our rented Subaru, through the deep
friendships that we formed and that have lasted to this day, and through our love
affair with the land and the people, I made an astonishing discovery: there are
other paths to Judaism besides the path through the synagogue, which for many
American Jews is often the only path. In Israel, without being observant, without
ever entering a synagogue, one lives the Torah as well as the rhythms of the Jewish
week and the Jewish year. What
happened to me in Israel transformed my life. There, I discovered my Jewish identity.
There, the Torah discovered me. Upon returning from Israel in the summer of 1982,
I began my formal study of the Hebrew language and learned to speak it. I also
began to study the Torah. Because of my immersion in German literature at Harvard,
I had the necessary tools to appreciate the narratives of the Torah as literature.
What particularly struck me is their open-endedness and their refusal to yield
simple, univocal meanings, aspects of the Torah's artistry that are enhanced by
the nature of the Hebrew language itself. While
living in Haifa in 1982 and teaching in the Department of Mathematics at the Technion,
I developed the ideas that would lead to my first research-level mathematics book,
Entropy, Large Deviations, and Statistical Mechanics. Published in 1985, my math
book eventually became a success. A theorem that was highlighted in the book and
that I had generalized from the work of another mathematician, J?rgen G?rtner,
became a basic theorem in the field that has been applied in numerous contexts;
it is now known as the G?rtner-Ellis theorem. My second math book, published in
1997, developed a new approach to the theory of large deviations. In recognition
of my research contributions, in 1999 I received the great honor of being elected
a fellow in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The
experiences of the 1980s—my love affair with Israel, studying the Torah,
publishing my first math book, discovering the Israeli branch of my family while
living in Jerusalem in 1986—were so intense, so identity-altering that they
demanded an outlet. This came in the form of a novel, which is now in the hands
of a literary agent who is trying to sell it to a publisher. I have also published
essays on the Torah, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Jewish-Christian relations,
and the art of Michelangelo. All
of which brings me to where I am now, professor of mathematics, adjunct professor
of Judaic Studies, teacher of "Purposes of Jewish Living." I read, teach,
write, do research, listen to music, bike, occasionally chant the Torah in our
synagogue. Through my involvement with mathematics and Jewish texts, my spiritual
search comes full circle. Both give access to the truth, and seeking the truth
is serving God. Most readers of this profile will accept this statement in the
context of Jewish texts. But they might wonder where in mathematics is the spirituality.
Isn't math just arithmetic and geometry, and hasn't it all been done before? A
sense of the profundity of mathematics can be conveyed by considering modern physical
theories such as that of superstrings, which hypothesizes the existence of ten
dimensions, of which we can perceive four: three dimensions of space and one of
time. These ten dimensions bear an uncanny resemblance to the ten dimensions of
the sefirot, the ten primordial numbers, which, according to Jewish mystical teachings,
express the soul and inner life of the hidden God. Without mathematics, modern
physical theories of matter, time travel, black holes, gravity, parallel universes,
the origin of the universe, the fate of the universe could not be formulated at
all. This is the surprise of modern science: that understanding the physical world
requires mind-boggling acrobatics of abstraction, of which only mathematics is
capable. To me the startling insight is that reality is so complicated, so layered,
so beyond our grasp to really understand. This is also one of the deep messages
of the Torah and Jewish mysticism, one that I have shared with my class in the
Florence Melton Adult Mini-School: like the Torah, the world is a multilayered
structure of grandeur and mystery, and we are mere atoms in God's infinite brain. From
the preconscious, Garden of Eden years of my youth until today, my life has been
blessed by infinite richness. However, the richness cannot be measured in books
and articles and honors. It can only be measured in the love that I have received
and that I have given. As I stroll into the ever-expanding horizons before me,
I thank God for the gift of being alive and for the new experiences that make
every day an adventure and a blessing. For
more information visit Richard's personal website: http://www.math.umass.edu/~rsellis A
more detailed profile that discusses other issues of interest to the FMAMS community
can be viewed at http://www.math.umass.edu/~rsellis/profile.html > More
Faculty Profiles
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