“A Mystery Unraveled, Twice”, 1998-04-14 (; backlinks; similar):
…Trithemius’s book, book 3 of his trilogy, Steganographia, circulated widely in manuscript form for a century before it was published by entrepreneurs in Frankfurt. Upon publication, it was banned by the Roman Catholic Church and attacked by Protestants. Yet it remained a cult classic, and, to this day, the book is pored over by believers in witchcraft and demons for spells to conjure spirits. Historians cite it as a prime example of 16th-century black magic. But some people always thought the book was something more—a cleverly disguised code.
And now two researchers, from different disciplines and knowing nothing about each other’s work, have broken the code. The first was Dr. Thomas Ernst, a professor of German at La Roche College, in Pittsburgh. Dr. Ernst resolved the Trithemius problem several years ago while he was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. But his 200-page paper, written in German and published in 1996 in a Dutch journal, Daphnis, went largely unnoticed. “There wasn’t much reaction to it”, Dr. Ernst said. Meanwhile, Dr. Jim Reeds, a mathematician at AT&T Labs [some biographical background] in Florham Park, N.J., had been fascinated by the Trithemius mystery for 30 years. Last month, he solved it. But two weeks later, as Dr. Reeds continued to search for information on Trithemius, he came upon Dr. Ernst’s paper and found that Dr. Ernst had already solved the mystery. Dr. Reeds’s 26-page manuscript has been accepted for publication in the journal Cryptologia, said David Kahn, its editor.
…In 1676, Wolfgang Ernst Heidel, an otherwise obscure figure who trained in the law and worked for the archbishop of Mainz, Germany, claimed that Trithemius’s third book was a code and that he had deciphered it. But Heidel wrote about his discovery in his own secret code, which no one could decipher. So his claim to have solved the mystery was itself a mystery, Dr. Ernst said.
…He [Reeds] took on the writing as a problem in cryptography, and within two weeks, he said, he had figured it out. As he had suspected, the demonology was simply a disguise for a code. Dr. Reeds, who does research on the mathematical problems of making and deciphering codes, said it took him two days to break Trithemius’s code. The hardest part, he said, was transcribing Trithemius’s tables of numbers from a photo copy of a microfilm into his computer. “For me, the mystery wasn’t, Could I solve a cryptogram? It was, Is there a cryptogram there?” Dr. Reeds said. “If there was a cryptogram and it wasn’t garbled—the book was printed 100 years after it was written—then I knew it wouldn’t be too hard to solve.” After all, he said wryly, “there has been some progress in the past 500 years.”
…Dr. Ernst said that when he cracked Trithemius’s code he wondered about Heidel, the 17th-century man who said he had decoded Trithemius but who had encoded his book giving the solution to the Trithemius code. So, Dr. Ernst returned to Heidel’s book and cracked Heidel’s code. Sure enough, Dr. Ernst discovered, Heidel had figured out Trithemius’s code.
Why would Heidel encode his discovery? “It was cryptological vanity”, Dr. Ernst said.
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