ABSTRACT
In February 2011, two people found a new pulsar in space. One of those people, Vitaliy Shiryaev, was in Moscow. A man who has a PhD in radio astronomy, Shirayaev’s day job is to solve what is called the ‘travelling salesman problem’: finding the shortest path between a cluster of cities for the trucks in the company, with the goal of saving a lot of money in fuel and time. In mathematical terms this is a nonpolynominal algorithm problem and requires Shiryaev to use a large computer cluster to get solutions. When his computer cluster is not busy solving the ‘travelling salesman problem’, he has them search for pulsars for the Einstein@home volunteer distributed computing project. Einstein@home searches gravitational wave data for signals from unknown pulsars. In February 2011, one of Shiryaev’s computers found a radio pulsar orbiting a white dwarf star every 9.4 hours. The pulsar, called J1952+2630 was found coincidentally, independantly and simultaneously by an English man, Stacey Eastham. Like Shiryaev, Eastham has a day job. He is a motorcycle inspector for the British Ministry of Transport and it is in his spare time that he crunches data for Einstein@home on computers that he builds himself from recycled materials, including old water bottles.
