According to a news item I found just now, Mary D’Imperio died on 28th May 2020 in Springfield VA, at the age of 90. The details were relayed by her cousin Robert G. D’Imperio.

Voynich researcher Don Hoffman visited her a few times in December 2019 at the nursing home she was in. He put together these notes on her life:

Mary Evelyn D’Imperio
Father – Dominic D’Imperio, born Biccari, Foggia, Italy, 31 August 1888 – 29 July 1965, sculptor, came to America in 1905, settled in Philadelphia, PA.
Mother – Edith Brownback Roberts D’Imperio, born Philadelphia, PA, 1902 – 1977, artist.
Parents married 20 June 1928.
Mary Evelyn D’Imperio born in Germantown, PA on 13 January 1930, an only child
High School – Germantown Friends School, Germantown, PA
College – Radcliffe, majored in comparative philology and classics, graduated 1950, Phi Beta Kappa
             – University of Pennsylvania, for second degree, this time in structural linguistics
She was recruited at her home by the US Government and underwent three days of testing there for her first job – was told by testers that she was one in a million both before testing and after successfully completing it.
Jobs – only one for her entire career – started working for US Government at NSA in 1951 as linguist and cryptanalyst, but thought of herself as a computer programmer – she had thought she was doomed to be a secretary, clerk, teacher or nurse before the government came calling.
She originally worked with an ATLAS I computer and developed a program for text use on computers called Text Macro Compiler (TEMAC) from 1960 to 1962, but got nowhere with male bosses with it because they couldn’t see a use for it & didn’t think it was worthwhile (and she thinks also because she was female and not forceful).
I think she is more proud of her TEMAC work than her Voynich Manuscript work (which she admits she has mostly forgotten).
After retirement she worked as volunteer with entomologist Dave Nickle at the Smithsonian Institution.
1987 to 2006 – frequent contributor to North American Breeding Bird Survey.
Traveled extensively worldwide for pleasure (but only to safe countries), often to bird watch.

In the Voynich field, D’Imperio was a quiet giant, who will always be well remembered for her (1976) book “The Voynich Manuscript – An Elegant Enigma“. I’m sad to hear of her passing. My thoughts are with her family.

13 thoughts on “Sad news: Mary D’Imperio has just died.

  1. M R Knowles on June 2, 2020 at 9:53 pm said:

    I was sad to hear that the famous mathematician John Conway died recently from Covid.

  2. john sanders on June 3, 2020 at 3:04 am said:

    Any gal mentored by ‘The Brig’ must have have been a fair hand at Crypto A. and no mere programmer as humbly claimed…..Like to imagine Mary D., the dedicated bird watcher now soaring on high with her beloved Golden Eagles and not those gooney birds depicted in Wilfred’s not so elegant nor enigmatic manuscript..

  3. john sanders on June 3, 2020 at 6:09 am said:

    http://www.historyextra.com have just posted a fairly run of the mill VM offering with usual mention of the parts Alan Turing and Bill Friedman played but no Tiltmans or D’Imperios which hints of it being an old re-hash with no interest in Mary’s own part nor her recent sad passing.

  4. My sincere condolences to her family, even if she is not going to read this blog.

  5. J.K. Petersen on June 3, 2020 at 10:26 am said:

    Yes, Turing, who never saw or worked on the VMS now gets the credit that should go to deserving researchers like D’Imperio. After 20,000 people re-Tweet it, it will become “true” (rolling eyes). I don’t know how you push back against majority fiction.

    .
    Thank you, Don, for filling in some information about her life and sharing it with us.

    Thank you, Nick, for letting us know.

    A brilliant woman, may her star ever burn bright. Sincere condolences to her family. Even if the establishment and the Web are not giving her due credit, at least we, in the Voynich community, can.

  6. James Pannozzi on June 3, 2020 at 1:25 pm said:

    Amazing woman, amazing accomplishments.

    That she was able to do all that in an era which clearly regarded
    women as second class citizens, career wise, only expands the
    quality of her achievements.
    My most profound condolences to the family.

  7. Milo Rea Gardner on June 3, 2020 at 2:09 pm said:

    Thank you for posting Mary’s clearly written book. Having excelled in cryptanalytics in the late 1950s , and freshly decoding Fibonacci’s 1292 AD ‘”Liber Abacl” 15 years ago, thanks to L.E Sigler, several number based attack approaches come to mind,:

    First, infinite series problems were written by Fibonacci in finite arithmetic to
    2-term and 3-term unit fraction series by subtracting LCM 1/m from n/p considered :

    (n/p – 1/m) = (mn – p)/mn

    1. 2-term series (mn – p) = 1

    Example ( 3/11 – 1/4) = (12 – 11)/44 meant 3/11 = 1/4 + 1/44

    2/ 3-term series subtracted a second LCM m

    Example

    (4/13 – 1/4) = (16 – 13)/52 = (3/52 – 1/18) = (54 – 52)/((18)(52)) = 1/468 meant

    4/13 = 1/4 + 1/18 + 1/468

    Encoding systems of this type date to 2050 BCE Egypt that scaled n/p by LCM m in a multiplication context such that

    n/p x (m/m) = mn/mp

    Found the Best divisors of mp that summed to mn …

    created 2-term, 3-term, 4-term , and 5-term unit fraction series

    Further encoding each numeral into Greek letters , Ionian or Doric, until 800 AD when Arabs ended the ciphered numeral step, and mentored Fibonacci to only write 2-term and 3-term series using numerals imported from India.

    Bacon, Dee and other great medieval scholars, cryptographers , would have been aware of the older ciphered numeral to any available set of alphabetic characters … and used it to encode numeric data …hence minimal or virtually no actual language data may.be reported .

    That is , only inventories may be reported, a type of message that also has been proven to be very difficult to break.

    Milo

  8. James Comegys on June 3, 2020 at 9:33 pm said:

    How sad Mary D’Imperio has not seen the Voynich rendered legible just yet. She did such foundational work, and so insightful.

  9. A life well spent. Rest in peace.

  10. john sanders on June 5, 2020 at 7:00 am said:

    Two things expressed by contributors to Voynic Ninja, that Mary would least wish to be remembered for in my opinion, would be her keystone Voynich translation text ‘Elegant Enigma’ which she claimed in her later years to have all but forgotten and her undoubted scholastic excellence which she would likely have preferred left off any tributes. Sometimes the doings of humble achievers such as D’Imperio are best kept at a lower though equally memorable and individually defining level such as ‘Mary the Bird Watcher’ perhaps.

  11. Kathryn D'Imperio on June 5, 2020 at 7:54 pm said:

    Thank you for the condolences. My brother and I last visited her in October of 2019 when she gave us the photo used in this article of her as a beautiful young woman. Mary was our cousin, and at nearly age 90 was still a very bright, intelligent and wonderful person. Our only regret was not being able to visit her again, due to covid restrictions, when we had hoped to in spring. May she Rest In Peace, and continue to enjoy nature and traveling.

  12. Marke Fincher on July 2, 2020 at 8:13 am said:

    Sad news indeed. “An Elegant Enigma” was calm, considered and rational, in a way that a lot of VMS research isn’t. My belated condolences

  13. Ruth Moors D'Eredita on July 20, 2020 at 5:34 pm said:

    Thank you all for this. Mary Evelyn was my cousin, and her dad’s portrait hangs in my dining room. Reading about her accomplishments brings a swell of pride. My daughter is Phi Beta Kappa and we wondered if Juliana was the first D’Imperio of our family to be elected so. We are proud she seems to be the second. The D’Imperios valued education over all. And all of us received the birdwatching gene, too. Rest in power, dear Mary Evelyn, we will never forget you.

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