Yesterday was my "one day of global fame" :-). The Booksellers prize announcement was reprinted all over the world, I had a phone interview for BBC Russian service program Bi-Bi-Seva "News with Human Face" and spoke to the reporter from Associated Press. It was the main version of the story reported everywhere else, and for a while I had fun watching in google news coming in every 5 minutes and I could see where the story was appearing. I was certainly happy that I live in Ithaca and nobody really cares about it and not many people know me. Also since no monetary value attached to the prize I did not have any worries unlike Grigory Perelman who was in news 2 days earlier
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8585407.stm .I think it is fair that he got awarded this Millenium Prize despite all the controversies raised some years ago.
The prize Perelman was awarded and the prize that made me "one day celebrity" are very different, however there is a tiny connection. Perelman proved more general conjecture - Thurston's conjecture from which Poincare conjecture just follow as a special case. Thurston formulated his conjecture in 1970's, and when he started to think about these different geometries, he came up with an idea to make a paper model of hyperbolic plane. It is like a very first step to start thinking about something that is hard to visualize. I hope that my crocheted hyperbolic planes are making this first step in understanding more complicated ideas easier.
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