Professional Code Breakers of Renaissance Venice

atlasobscura.com

27 pointsprostoalex3 comments

I was so sure that the article would be by Ioanna Iordanou, but it isn't.

She is about to publish a book about this:

Venice's Secret Service: Organising Intelligence in the Renaissance

Amazon says it will be out in October.

That era also had competitive equation solving, i.e. math contests.

Math contests feature prominently in the Cardano-Tartaglia dispute, an important chapter in the history of the discovery of the cubic equation.