Sarah Flannery was, at sixteen years old, the winner of the 1999 Esat Young Scientist Exhibition for development of the Cayley–Purser algorithm, based on work she had done with researchers at Baltimore Technologies during a brief internship there. The project, entitled "Cryptography - A new algorithm versus the RSA", also won her the EU Young Scientist of the Year Award for 1999. Her book In Code, co-written with her father, mathematician David Flannery, retells the story of the making and breaking of the algorithm and of the enjoyment that she got, as a child and throughout her life, from solving mathematical puzzles.