Mathematician Vasily Dmitrievich Matveev enjoyed a reputation as an eccentric. With a disheveled beard, absent-minded and purposeful at the same time, accompanied everywhere by his pet octopus, he loved to tell his students about the art of drawing logical conclusions - well, at least based on the material of Russian folk songs. And in his free time from lessons, Matveev thought about the Airaldi problem, which had not been solved by scientists for three hundred years, but without solving it it was impossible to move the Earth to a new star from the Sun threatening to explode.