Mary E. D’Imperio died on May 28, 2020 in Springfield VA.

Mary D’Imperio was an American cryptographer. She was introduced to the problem of the Voynich Manuscript by John Tiltman in 1975. She has written 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’.

D’Imperio has degrees in comparative philology and classics from Radcliffe College, where she graduated magna cum laude, and structural linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa at Radcliffe in 1950. According to a 1976 introduction by Vera Filby: “Her career has been with the government since 1951. She is a linguist and cryptanalyst, but thinks of herself mainly as a computer programmer”.

Between 1960 and 1962, D’Imperio created the TEMAC (Text Macro Compiler) language for processing text. From 1987 to 2006, she was a frequent contributor to North American Breeding Bird Survey reports.

A special thanks to Robert G. D’Imperio, cousin of Mary, for sharing the passing of Mary D’Imperio.