Giambattista della Porta

Giambattista della Porta was an Italian scholar, polymath and playwright who lived in Naples during the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Counter-Reformation. He spent most of his life on scientific work and learned from tutors and visiting scholars rather than through formal schooling. His best known book is Magia Naturalis, or Natural Magic, first published in 1558, which gathers his investigations of subjects as varied as occult philosophy, astrology, alchemy, mathematics, meteorology and natural philosophy. For the history of computing his importance lies in cryptography. In 1563 he published De Furtivis Literarum Notis, a work on secret writing in which he described the first known digraphic substitution cipher. The historian of cryptography Charles J. Mendelsohn called him the outstanding cryptographer of the Renaissance.