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CNN Saturday Morning News
Woman Made Famous for Finding Encryption Algorithm
Aired June 23, 2001 - 08:38 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Kiss the Blarney Stone and you will be endowed with the gift of gab, or so the saying goes. But what about math? Blarney, Ireland's Sarah Flannery rose to fame at the age of 16, winning headlines as 1999's young scientist of the year. She discovered a new algorithm and an encryption system that has a lot of use on the Internet, among other things. Sarah's passion for puzzles, games and matrices was nurtured by her father. Sarah's new book is called "In Code: A Mathematical Journey." It's part puzzle book, part memoir and she joins us from New York City this morning.
Sarah, good to have you with us.
SARAH FLANNERY, AUTHOR, "IN CODE: A MATHEMATICAL JOURNEY": Good morning.
O'BRIEN: All right, what, first of all, what's your earliest recollection of realizing you had a love and a knack, I guess that's putting it mildly, for mathematics?
FLANNERY: Well, since I've been very, very young my dad's always given us puzzles, me and my brothers puzzles, and I've always enjoyed them, I think, and really enjoyed the sense of achievement that you get from solving them. And just, he would give them to us over dinner or something and write them up on this blackboard that we have in our kitchen and just doing them and trying to solve them with my brothers, that's what I've always liked, enjoyed doing.
O'BRIEN: And when he did this, was that fun for you?
FLANNERY: Yeah, definitely.
O'BRIEN: So it's always been something you've loved, in other words?
FLANNERY: Well, sometimes. As long as you're in the mood for it and as long as you don't find out that the puzzle he's just given you is impossible or something.
O'BRIEN: Oh, so your dad used to give you a few tough ones, huh?
FLANNERY: Sometimes. If he was trying to get rid of us.
O'BRIEN: Do they call them curve balls in Ireland? They threw you a curve ball? FLANNERY: I've never heard that expression.
O'BRIEN: That's a baseball thing. Never mind.
FLANNERY: OK.
O'BRIEN: Well, let me ask you this. What's next for you? At a very young age you've achieved a lot of recognition. Presumably you're going to pursue mathematics for your career. What kinds of things would you like to do? What kinds of problems would you like to solve?
FLANNERY: Well, at the moment I'm just, I've just finished my first year in university and so I want to finish that and hopefully go on to maybe get a Ph.D. before I leave the education system. And I don't know what I want to do or in where and in what subject. But I know that I hope, hopefully I can end up doing something that I enjoy doing as much as I did my project on cryptography.
O'BRIEN: All right. Now for people who don't know too much about cryptography, we've created a very simple encoded phrase here which I, as a simple TV journalist who avoided math, I had just a few minutes to put this together. And I came up with this and if you look at the answer, do you have it or not? I told Sarah I wouldn't put her on the spot with this.
FLANNERY: My brain is completely not working, I'm afraid.
O'BRIEN: All right. It's very simple. This is cryptography. Let's show the answer if we will. Kiss the Blarney Stone. All we did was add, we went up one letter in each case. Now, that's a very simple...
FLANNERY: I was looking at down.
O'BRIEN: Well, that's all right. That's OK. It's a very simple case of cryptography. Now, that in its simplest form is cryptography. What is hard about creating new encryption schemes that cannot be broken?
FLANNERY: Well, encryption schemes use complicated mathematics to just simply put a disguise on information and you want the disguise to be put on very easily but taken off -- but you want it to be very, very difficult to be taken off by the wrong person and easy to be taken off by the right person. And so you're relying on the complexity of the math and certain problems which you can be pretty sure are infeasible, even with the largest computers, to solve.
O'BRIEN: Now, when you say it that way, it sounds like it might be easy. But it's not, is it?
FLANNERY: No, not at all. One of the things that people rely on in encryption algorithms is the fact that it's very, very difficult to factor those large numbers. If you take two numbers, two prime numbers, and multiply them together and publish their product, it's very difficult given that product to figure out what those two numbers were in the first place. And it's problems like that that people rely on but...
O'BRIEN: And it's important in the Internet world, the information world, that we have these good encryption schemes, because lots of commerce occurs now on the Internet, right?
FLANNERY: Definitely. You want your credit card to be encrypted when it's going down the line if you want to buy something and it's used all over the place.
O'BRIEN: All right, Sarah Flannery keeping your credit card transactions safe on the Internet and pushing the envelope in the world of mathematics. She has a wonderful book which is about mathematics, but don't make that, you shouldn't get nervous about that because it's about other things, too, about a relationship between a father and her daughter, as well. It's called "In Code" and we invite you to check it out. Sarah Flynn, thanks for being our guest on CNN SATURDAY MORNING.
FLANNERY: Thank you.
O'BRIEN: All right.
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