Sarah Flannery has been besieged since her win last week in the Esat Young Scientist Exhibition. The media have been camped on her door, universities have offered scholarships and computer companies and banks have been tempting her with research opportunities.
"It is beginning to become a nuisance," she admitted, speaking from her Cork home yesterday. "I am on call number a-hundred-and-something already and there have been 50 today."
And today yet another visitor, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, will make a pilgrimage to her Blarney home. He will also meet Sarah's school-mate, Vincent Foley, who won the Intel Excellence Award which Sarah took last year with an early version of her project.
The 16-year-old student from Scoil Mhuire Gan Smal in Blarney so impressed - and bamboozled - the Young Scientist judges that they brought in mathematical reinforcements to assess her new encoding system for electronic information. This is much faster than the world standard, RSA, in use in over 100,000 systems.
"It is a bit daunting," her mother, Elaine, said. "The phone hasn't stopped ringing. The latest [call] has come from Colombia." As she spoke a television crew from the US broadcasting company, ABC, was in the next room setting up their equipment.
The US computer firm, Hewlett Packard has offered her the chance of working for a few weeks with its research department; Cambridge University and Trinity College have invited her to sign up when she graduates. The banks are also interested in her work, Sarah said, but with a note of obvious exasperation in her voice. "This is really so much," she said. "All of the attention has prevented me from standing back from it all." She was not, she said, a maths wizard. "I have the same problems at school as anyone else." Once she got involved in the mathematical complexity of encryption, however, she got hooked. "I was surprised at how much I got into it."
She is unsure what to do about her discovery, described as "brilliant" by the Young Scientist judges. "All the technical and legal area is way over my head." She is considering whether to make it available free on the Internet. Demonstrating her practical side, however, she added, "I have my Leaving Cert to do."
"We are tremendously excited for Sarah. Last week just she was a humble schoolgirl," Sarah's father, Mr David Flannery, said yesterday.
Mr Flannery, who lectures in mathematics at the Cork Institute of Technology, said his daughter was not anxious to be described as something out of the ordinary. "She is no genius or prodigy, but she has a mathematics competence," he said, although admitting that she did achieve eight As in her Junior Cert last year.
"It is only by accident that she entered the competition at all," Mr Flannery said. She wanted to do something practical with mathematics and went on a Transition Year placement for a week with Dr Michael Purser of Trinity College and founder of Baltimore Technologies. He provided the initial ideas that developed into Sarah's encryption algorithm.
"It is difficult to explain but easy to use," she said. Her formula takes electronic data and scrambles them using her complicated mathematical system which moves the data through a series of matrices. "It isn't better, it is faster" than the existing standard, RSA, devised by three students and released in 1977. "I have tried to prove it is as secure as RSA," she said, but this could be shown only over time.
