Sarah Flannery facts for kids
Sarah Flannery is an amazing Irish mathematician. She was born in 1982 in County Cork, Ireland. When she was just 16 years old, in 1999, she won a big science competition called the Esat Young Scientist Exhibition. She won for creating a new way to make secret codes, called the Cayley–Purser algorithm. This project also earned her the EU Young Scientist of the Year Award in the same year.
Contents
About Sarah Flannery
Sarah went to an all-girls primary school and then to Scoil Mhuire Gan Smál for secondary school in Blarney.
Her Book and Family
In 2001, after winning the competition, Sarah wrote a book called In Code with her father, David Flannery. He was also a mathematician. The book tells the story of how she created and then "broke" her own secret code. It also shares how much fun she had solving math puzzles when she was growing up. Sarah often says that her father's support helped her a lot in her math and coding journey.
Her Education and Career
Sarah studied computer science at Peterhouse, which is a college at the University of Cambridge. She finished her studies in 2003.
After college, she worked as a software engineer for different companies. A software engineer helps design and build computer programs. She worked at Electronic Arts, a company famous for video games. She also worked at a company called TirNua as a "Chief Scientist." There, she helped create the virtual money system in a game and the online services that made game features work. She also worked at RockYou and other places that develop software.
Sarah even helped set up a special program at Electronic Arts to share computer code. She also created cool visual displays of how software and game content were made. These displays helped make games better. She also successfully managed the virtual money system in a game called EA-Land.
Before all this, she worked on a technical software product called Mathematica for Wolfram Research.
Honors and Family
In her home city of Cork, the lights on St. Patrick's Street, a main road, are named after her!
Sarah Flannery is also the sister of the well-known singer and songwriter Mick Flannery.
See also
- Intel International Science and Engineering Fair
- Linear algebra
- Cryptography
- Cayley–Purser algorithm
