Gordon Rugg

[1] Born in Perth, Scotland, Rugg has a first degree in French and Linguistics and a PhD in psychology, both from Reading University, UK.

His background includes working as a timberyard worker, a field archaeologist and an English lecturer.

He is co-author with Marian Petre of two books for students which focus on semi-tacit skills in research.

This work formed one main strand in the Verifier method which he developed with Joanne Hyde.

He examined a range of techniques known in the late sixteenth century, and found that, by using a modified Cardan grille combined with a large table of meaningless syllables, it was possible to produce meaningless text that had qualitative and statistical properties similar to those of "Voynichese".