A charming story, well worth slogging through the heavy loads of math.
A young Irishwoman’s account of the mathematical studies that made her Young Scientist of the Year.
Flannery, now a first-year student at Cambridge, grew up solving logic puzzles posed by her father, a math teacher (and her collaborator here). In the beginning chapters, she offers the reader a selection of those brainteasers, many of which depend on mathematical reasoning. So when her high school science teacher recruited her to enter Ireland’s Young Scientist competition, Sarah’s father steered her toward a project with a strong math basis: cryptography, the encoding and decoding of messages. This once-cumbersome process is now handled by sophisticated computer programs based on number theory—especially the factoring of very large numbers. Sarah decided to concentrate on the programming aspect, to give herself hands-on experience with the computer work. But first she had to learn the relevant mathematics. To bring the reader up to speed, the authors step back from Sarah’s story to present the mathematical foundations of modern cryptology: prime numbers, factoring, and other arcana of number theory. This section is in many ways the meat of the story, accessible to anyone not totally allergic to equations. As Sarah learned the math, she spotted an alternative to the standard RSA algorithm on which modern cryptology is based, and soon her project turned into an exposition of her new method—which in time won her honors as Young Scientist of the Year not only in Ireland, but in all of Europe. The latter chapters tell of the competitions, her preparation and her bouts of nerves, her genuine surprise at winning, and the sometimes-exasperating aftermath as the media discovered her and turned her (for a while, at least) into a celebrity.
A charming story, well worth slogging through the heavy loads of math.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7611-2384-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Workman
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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