Russell Alan Hulse was born on November 28, 1950, in New York City. His parents, Alan Hulse and the former Betty Joan Wedemeyer, encouraged his interest and understanding of the world around him. As a boy, Hulse enjoyed working with chemistry and mechanical engineering construction sets as well as biology dissection kits. In 1963 he was admitted to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, a facility devoted to the encouragement of scientific values.

Following graduation in 1966, he was admitted to Cooper Union. He received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1970 and started graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst the same year. "When I was approached by Joe Taylor...to see if I was interested in doing a pulsar search for my thesis, it did not take too long for me to agree," he remembered in his Nobel acceptance lecture.

Intermittently from December 1973 until January 1975, Hulse and fellow...