Historical corner column: Foreword

Abstract

Recently, I have been trying to widen the topics of this column, which in the past have been more focused on those relative to Commission B, Fields and Waves, due to my background. The contribution to this issue, "The Roots of Modern Cryptography: Leon Battista Alberti's ‘De Cifris’," by Stefano Selleri (University of Florence), is more aimed at Commission C, Radiocommunication Systems and Signal Processing. This is because it deals with encryption and code breaking, topics that are as hot as ever in this era, in which all kinds of bank transactions, signatures of agreements, and so on occur via the Internet. This is indeed an expansion of the contribution by G. Pelosi and S. Selleri, "Florence and a Leap in Cryptography: The Leon Battista Alberti Cypher Disk," presented at IEEE HISTELCON 2021, Moscow, Russia, 10–12 November 2021.