Luke Pebody

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Luke Thomas 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 with a Bachelor of Arts degree 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.

In 2001, he successfully applied for a junior research fellowship at Cambridge. Before returning to take up residence, he completed a year's research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey

Pebody's contributions to his field included:

• "Contraction-deletion invariants for graphs" (with Béla Bollobás and Oliver Riordan) (J. Combin. Theory Ser. B 80 (2000) 320-345)
• "A state-space representation of the HOMFLY polynomial" (with Béla Bollobás and David Weinreich) (Contemporary Combinatorics, Bolyai Society Mathematical Studies 10, 2002) PDF download

Pebody left the field of mathematics for financial services.