3 Review(s)

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.