Cryptography, the art and science of secret writing, has given rise to numerous remarkable personalities and mysterious puzzles throughout history. In this chapter, we focus on two particularly fascinating examples: the enigmatic Voynich Manuscript and Leon Battista Alberti, the Renaissance polymath and pioneer of cryptography.
Let’s begin with the Voynich Manuscript, a handwritten document of almost mythical incomprehensibility. This magnificently illustrated codex, named after the bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912, remains an unsolved puzzle. Its unintelligible script and strange illustrations, ranging from botanical drawings to astronomical diagrams to seemingly nonsensical scenes, have led many to label it the „most mysterious manuscript in the world.“ Even state-of-the-art computer-based cryptography and pattern recognition techniques have thus far failed to unveil its secrets. On the other end of the spectrum, we find Leon Battista Alberti, an outstanding scholar of the Italian Renaissance widely recognized as the father of Western cryptography. Alberti was a true polymath, making contributions to architecture, painting, sculpture, mathematics, and, of course, cryptography. In an era when most encryption methods relied on simple monoalphabetic substitutions, Alberti introduced a revolutionary new technique: polyalphabetic substitution.
As an example of Alberti’s cryptographic innovation, let’s consider his famous Alberti Disk. This mechanical device consisted of two rotating disks, each representing the alphabet in a different order. By turning the disks, the user could employ different sets of alphabets for encryption, making decryption without knowledge of the exact disk settings difficult.
The Voynich Manuscript and Alberti embody two different aspects of cryptography: the unsolved puzzle and the groundbreaking innovation. The manuscript presents cryptographers with an unsolved enigma that challenges and inspires them. Alberti, on the other hand, reshaped the cryptography landscape with his technical innovations, paving the way for future encryption techniques.
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