I remember seeing the cover of this book 23 years ago when it passed through my collection development shelf at my previous place of employment. I also remember skimming some of the content to see what it was about, since the part about the father and the daughter working on math puzzles at the kitchen table in Ireland stuck with me.

Now, 23 years later, I came across the book at the Jeffco Whale of a Book Sale, and I finally had the time to read it. It was fascinating to learn how Sarah Flannery did her work to land several prizes at several regional and international high school STEM contests. In 1999, she was the “European Young Scientist of the Year.” It gave her instant fame in Europe and in the United States.

The book does a good job of explaining the basics of cryptography. She (and her father) covers a bit of the mathematics behind the theory.

I also found it interesting that she mentioned one of my favorite books of the 1980s — The Cuckoo’s egg: Tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage by Clifford Stoll. Of course she liked that book.

She is now Sarah Berthelet in San Francisco, according to her LinkedIn account. I am really glad that she didn’t burn out after being a teenage whizkid. I was also surprised to see that she didn’t go on to get a PhD after going to the U of Cambridge, but that may have been all well and good enough. She did not need to get a PhD to prove how smart and capable she is.