| Mary D'Imperio | |
| Birth Date: | 13 January 1930 |
| Known For: | cryptographer and computer programmer |
Mary D'Imperio (January 13, 1930, in Germantown, Pennsylvania – May 28, 2020, in Springfield, Virginia)[1] was an American cryptographer.
Mary D'Imperio was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, January 13, 1930. Her father was the Philadelphia sculptor, Dominic D'Imperio.[2]
D'Imperio received degrees in comparative philology and classics from Radcliffe College from which she graduated magna cum laude,[3] and structural linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe in 1950.[4]
Between 1960 and 1962, D'Imperio created the TEMAC (Text Macro Compiler) language for processing text.[5] From 1987 to 2006, she was a frequent contributor to North American Breeding Bird Survey reports.[6]
She was introduced to the problem of the Voynich Manuscript by John Tiltman in 1975. She wrote several books and journal articles about the manuscript. These include The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma, The Voynich Manuscript: A Scholarly Mystery, and An Application of Cluster Analysis and Multiple Scaling to the Question of "Hands" and "Languages" in the Voynich Manuscript.
According to a 1976 introduction by Vera Filby: "Her career has been with the government since 1951. She was a linguist and cryptanalyst, but thought of herself mainly as a computer programmer".[7]
She died May 28, 2020, in Springfield, Virginia.
Web site: List of articles by Mary D'Imperio in Cryptolog (Name redacted in the original; references begin with Feb 75 CAMINO News). National Security Agency. 7 August 2023.