Luke Pebody

Luke Pebody (born 1977) is a mathematician who solved the necklace problem. Educated at Rugby School, Luke Pebody was admitted to Cambridge University at the age of 14 to read mathematics. He went up when he was 16, making him one of the youngest undergraduates of modern times.

He proceeded to a doctoral degree at the University of Memphis, where, working with respected graph theorist Bela Bollobas, he presented a solution of the reconstruction problem for abelian groups, including the necklace problem. Whilst at Memphis, he invented the board game Intersect.

In 2001 he was offered and accepted a junior research fellowship at his alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge. Before returning to take up residence in Cambridge, he completed a year's research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and did a few weeks of work over the summer for Microsoft Research in Seattle, Washington. He is now a full-time resident fellow of Trinity College, specialising in combinatorics.

Dr. Pebody's noteworthy contributions to his field include:

• "Ramsey theory in graphs" (public lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1997)
• "Contraction-deletion invariants for graphs" (with Bela Bollobas and Oliver Riordan) (J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 80 (2000) 320-345)
• "On combinatorial reconstruction" (public lecture at the University of Memphis, 2001)
• "A state-space representation of the HOMFLY polynomial" (with Bela Bollobas and David Weinreich) (Contemporary Combinatorics, Bolyai Society Mathematical Studies 10, 2002) PDF download
• "Combinatorial reconstruction using invariant polynomials" (public lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study, 2002)

As at August 2003, Dr. Pebody is engaged to marry social economist Elizabeth Swiers of New School University in New York.