Abramo Colorni

Abramo Colorni (c. 1544 to 1599) was an Italian-Jewish polymath of the late Renaissance, born and buried in Mantua. He worked as an engineer for the Gonzaga and Este courts, studied at the University of Ferrara, and spent years at the court of Rudolf II in Prague and later in Württemberg. He is best known for Scotographia (1593), a treatise on cryptography that describes polyalphabetic substitution ciphers and a cipher wheel, and he also left treatises on mathematical tables and on the measurement of lines. Contemporaries admired and doubted him in equal measure, calling him an alchemist, magician and inventor, yet his writing attacked superstition such as palmistry and argued for a systematic natural science.