In Code: A Mathematical Journey: A Mathematical Adventure

David Flannery, Sarah Flannery

ISBN 10: 1861972717 / ISBN 13: 9781861972712

Published by Profile Books 26/03/2001, 2001

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Bibliographic Details

Title: In Code: A Mathematical Journey: A ...

Publisher: Profile Books 26/03/2001

Publication Date: 2001

Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis:

Sarah Flannery is a cryptographer and mathematician already with an international reputation. She is also a sport-loving Co. Cork teenager who takes her Leaving Certificate next year. In this remarkable book, written with her father, her first maths teacher, she writes about her life, mathematics and making codes - and this extraordinary year. That is just one of the scores of media comments from all over the world which followed Sarah's winning this January, at the age of 16, the Irish Young Scientist of the Year award with a highly innovative, speedy and secure system of encoding data on the Internet. Since then she has travelled the world and lectured, and had approaches from many computer companies and universities. Her system still needs full peer evaluation but what is not in doubt is the originality of her mathematical mind. Her book offers many different things: it is a fresh and modest self-portrait by a girl who is the reverse of a comic-strip swot; it is an inspiring account of a mathematical education; with many puzzles and examples it offers a mass of insights into cryptography and numeracy.

Review:

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