In Code: A Mathematical Journey (Hardcover)

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

At the age of 16 Sarah Flannery won the prestigious 1999 Ireland Young Scientist of the Year award for original work in the area of cryptography (the science of codes). This enjoyable book is an account of her life and work which has so far led to a series of international science prizes, plus some of the mathematics thrown in for good measure. The unusual combination of a maths puzzle book, a primer in the maths behind codes, a story so exciting it could easily be fiction, and an insightful biography of a child prodigy, ensures you don't have to be a maths geek to enjoy this. This charming story is unashamedly frank about the innocence and down-to-earth enthusiasm of an earnest 15-year-old girl from a small village in the Irish countryside, and about how her genius and her hard work led her to important mathematical discoveries which soon attracted the interest of eminent academics and high technology companies around the world. Cryptography is usually associated with spies and counter-intelligence, but today it is large banks and corporations, keen to protect their transactions and information from prying outsiders, who are at the cutting edge of cryptography. Despite the antiquated image of the 'enigma'-cracking boffins at Bletchley Park, codes are what the internet is founded on, and its future depends upon continued developments in this sometimes overlooked area of science. Sarah Flannery's story has been hyped by a media that cannot resist the combination of an obscure country teenager who outfoxes the older brains in the business to achieve international acclaim, and who could also be on the threshold of making a fortune. This book provides a useful counterweight by dispassionately and modestly telling the true story behind the headlines, the story of a family that believes in the importance of hard work, that has an unfashionable respect for intellectual endeavour, and of a girl with a startling brain and a rare absence of ego. The book makes you hungry to learn what happens next - will international superstardom turn her head? One thing's for sure - she'd make a charming (and welcome) successor to Bill Gates. (Kirkus UK)

A young Irishwoman's account of the mathematical studies that made her Young Scientist of the Year. Flannery, now a first-year student at Cambridge, grew up solving logic puzzles posed by her father, a math teacher (and her collaborator here). In the beginning chapters, she offers the reader a selection of those brainteasers, many of which depend on mathematical reasoning. So when her high school science teacher recruited her to enter Ireland's Young Scientist competition, Sarah's father steered her toward a project with a strong math basis: cryptography, the encoding and decoding of messages. This once-cumbersome process is now handled by sophisticated computer programs based on number theory-especially the factoring of very large numbers. Sarah decided to concentrate on the programming aspect, to give herself hands-on experience with the computer work. But first she had to learn the relevant mathematics. To bring the reader up to speed, the authors step back from Sarah's story to present the mathematical foundations of modern cryptology: prime numbers, factoring, and other arcana of number theory. This section is in many ways the meat of the story, accessible to anyone not totally allergic to equations. As Sarah learned the math, she spotted an alternative to the standard RSA algorithm on which modern cryptology is based, and soon her project turned into an exposition of her new method-which in time won her honors as Young Scientist of the Year not only in Ireland, but in all of Europe. The latter chapters tell of the competitions, her preparation and her bouts of nerves, her genuine surprise at winning, and the sometimes-exasperating aftermath as the media discovered her and turned her (for a while, at least) into a celebrity. A charming story, well worth slogging through the heavy loads of math. (Kirkus Reviews)