In Code
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Sarah Flannery, David Flannery |
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| Subtitle | A Mathematical Journey |
| Publisher | Workman Publishing |
| Honors | |
| In January 1999, Sarah Flannery, a sports-loving teenager from Blarney in County Cork, Ireland was awarded Ireland’s Young Scientist of the Year for her extraordinary research and discoveries in Internet cryptography. The following day, her story began appearing in Irish papers and soon after was splashed across the front page of the London Times, complete with a photo of Sarah and a caption calling her “brilliant.” Just 16, she was a mathematician with an international reputation. In Code is a heartwarming story that will have readers cheering Sarah… | |
In January 1999, Sarah Flannery, a sports-loving teenager from Blarney in County Cork, Ireland was awarded Ireland’s Young Scientist of the Year for her extraordinary research and discoveries in Internet cryptography. The following day, her story began appearing in Irish papers and soon after was splashed across the front page of the London Times, complete with a photo of Sarah and a caption calling her “brilliant.” Just 16, she was a mathematician with an international reputation.
In Code is a heartwarming story that will have readers cheering Sarah on. Originally published in England and co-written with her mathematician father, David Flannery, In Code is “a wonderfully moving story…about the thrill of the mathematical chase” (Nature) and “a paean to intellectual adventure” (Times Educational Supplement). A memoir in mathematics, it is all about how a girl next door, nurtured by her family, moved from the simple math puzzles that were the staple of dinnertime conversation to prime numbers, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, Fermat’s Little Theorem, Googols- and finally into her breathtaking algorithm. Parallel with each step is a modest girl’s own self-discovery-her values, her burning curiosity, the joy of persistence, and, above all, her love for her family.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Sarah Flannery is the Irish teenager who last year stunned the world by inventing a way of making public-key encryption much more efficient. Given that this is the underlying security technology of e-commerce, that is an achievement that many of the world’s leading research laboratories would have been proud of. That it came from a modest, well-adjusted, cheerful Irish teenager is nothing short of miraculous.
In Code is the story of how she did it, and of what happened to her and her family as a result. It’s an engaging, almost playful, book in which the reader is encouraged to spend lots of time working out mathematical puzzles set by the authors. This is not sadism on their part, but a cunning plot to get the reader thinking like a cryptographer. It’s also a reflection of the way the Flannery family works, for it’s clear that puzzle-solving is as much a part of their communal life as eating. The puzzles are interwoven with a narrative of Sarah’s annus mirabilis, in which she found a stupendously clever way of easing the computational load which public-key cryptography imposes on machines. What’s striking about this account is its level-headed, self-deprecating, eminently sane tone. This is a girl whose head hasn’t been turned by fame. And that, in a way, is her greatest achievement.—John Naughton
