http://www.sunday-times.co.uk:80/news/pages/tim/99/01/13/timfgneur02008.html?1063974
Teenager cracks e-mail code
BY AUDREY MAGEE, IRELAND CORRESPONDENT
AN Irish schoolgirl was yesterday hailed as a mathematical genius
after devising a code for sending secret messages by computer.
Sarah Flannery used the science of cryptography to design a code that
is ten times faster than the one currently used to convert
confidential information so that it can be sent via the Internet and
e-mail. She has been inundated with offers of jobs and scholarships
from international computer companies and universities.
Miss Flannery, 16, from Blarney, Co Cork, used matrices to formulate
an alternative to RSA, the current data protection code, devised by
three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977.
The result is an algorithm, a mathematical blueprint, that is far
faster than the RSA and equally secure.
Miss Flannery, whose father, David, lectures in mathematics at Cork
Institute of Technology, devised her code to enter the Irish Young
Scientists and Technology Exhibition. She won at the weekend and left
the judges unable fully to comprehend her project. They described her
work as "brilliant" and one judge advised her to patent it.
Miss Flannery said she was thrilled. "I had to go through lots of
stuff before I finalised the theory," she said. "I reached critical
points where I would get stuck for three weeks or so. I just kept
thinking about it and then the whole thing slipped into place." The
oldest of five children, she earned eight As in her junior
certificate, the Irish equivalent of GCSEs, with extra tuition from
her father.
Miss Flannery is now deciding what to do with her new code, the
Cayley-Purser, named after Arthur Cayley, an eminent 19th-century
Cambridge mathematician, and Michael Purser, a cryptographer who
inspired her. She is considering publishing her findings rather than
patenting as she does not want people to pay for her discovery.
She will represent Ireland at the EU Science Contest in Greece in
September.
--
1024/D9C69DF9 steve mynott [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pineal.com/
chemistry is applied theology.
-- augustus stanley owsley iii
