Meredith Knox Gardner (October 12 (or 20), 1912–August 9, 2002) was an American linguist and codebreaker. Gardner worked in counter-intelligence, decoding Soviet intelligence traffic regarding espionage in the United States, in what came to be known as the Venona project.

Gardner was born in Okolona, Mississippi and grew up in Austin, Texas. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, he earned a master's degree in German from University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was a teaching assistant from 1938 to 1940. He was a linguist and professor of German at the University of Akron when the United States Army's Signals Intelligence Service recruited him to work on breaking German codes. Soon after, he started working on the Japanese codes instead, mastering the Japanese language in only a few months.

In 1946, Gardner began work on a highly-secret project (later codenamed VENONA) to break the Soviet cryptosystems. The Soviet encryption system involved the use of one-time pads, and thus was thought to be unbreakable. However, the Soviets made the mistake of reusing certain pages of their pads.

Zoe Gardner (b. 1975, London, England) is a comedy writer/actress in television, radio and theatre.

Gardner studied at Cambridge University and is half of the comedy team The Congress of Oddities. They have recorded a TV pilot based on their live Congress shows for Celador Productions.

Recent television includes; Mongrels (BBC Three) 2010, Ideal (BBC Two) 2009, Katy Brand's Big Ass Show, (ITV2) 2008/09, Cowards (BBC Four) 2008, Comedy Shuffle (BBC Three) 2007, 28 Acts in 28 Minutes (BBC Three) 2007, The Slammer (CBBC) 2006, Meet The Blogs (Mersey Television), 2006 Comedy Cuts (Granada for ITV2) 2007.

Gardner also wrote and performed her own solo show entitled Zoe Gardner's Fault at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Theatre credits include Coffee, a play by Glyn Cannon and Colin Hoult's Carnival of Monsters, both at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

In 2010 Zoe performed in Hoult's second solo show Enemy of the World and her own show An Hour of Telly Live alongside Margaret Cabourn-Smith both at the Edinburgh Festival.