Luke Pebody
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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 all time.
Having graduated as an Optime from Trinity College, Cambridge, he proceeded to a doctoral degree at the University of Memphis, where, working with respected graph theorist Béla Bollobás, he presented a possible solution of the reconstruction problem for abelian groups, including the necklace problem. Whilst at Memphis, he invented the board game Intersect.
In 2001 he successfully applied for a junior research fellowship at his alma mater. 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 was until Lent Term 2006 a full-time resident fellow of Trinity College, specialising in combinatorics.
Dr Pebody's contributions to his field include:
- "Ramsey theory in graphs" (public lecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1997)
- "Contraction-deletion invariants for graphs" (with Béla Bollobás 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 Béla Bollobás 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)
In his spare time, Dr Pebody is an enthusiastic dramaturge, having directed and appeared in a number of productions within Cambridge as well as at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Dr Pebody has now, rather than pursuing an academic career, elected to seek employment with a hedge fund in the United States, for which he has won great critical and popular acclaim.
The surname Pebody is pronounced with a short E as in 'bell end', as opposed to the more common variant Peabody. He is married to a fundraiser called Elizabeth Swiers Pebody.
