The same post at Quomodocumque has this completely odd video of an interview with William Thurston and fashion designer Dai Fujiwara. Apparently, Thurston provided the inspiration for Issey Miyake’s fall fashions, “8 Geometry Link Models as Metaphor of the Universe”.
You can see the finale of their Paris fashion show here, including Thurston joining Fujiwara on stage. (The whole thing didn’t seem real to me until I saw Thurston walk on-stage in that clip. I have no idea what the designs have to do with the Geometrization Conjecture, but the title of the show certainly suggests that’s what they had in mind.)
The proof of the Geometrization Conjecture was sketched by Perelman (it implies the Poincare Conjecture). I wonder if the brief burst of publicity in the wake of Perelman led to the show.
The story is given on pages 249-250 of ???????????????by Kasuga Masahito. Kasuga Masahito made an NHK documentary about Perelman’s proof of Geometrization. It’s an amazing piece of television, explaining some math (at least, the excitement of working on a big conjecture) to a general audience- I think it is one of the better documentaries about mathematics I have seen, and a great leap of faith by NHK to believe such a thing could be popular. This was watched by Dai Fujiwara, creative director of Issey Miyake, who telephoned NHK to ask to speak to Kasuga Masahito. He explained that he was inspired to work on “the 8 possible shapes of space” that had been discussed in the documentary he had just watched on television. Kasuga Masahito was surprised and delighted that his documentary had reached the “general audience”- somebody with no a-priori connection to topology. Kasuga Masahito is not a topologist himself so he could not help, but he introduced Dai to Kojima Sadayoshi of TITech, who in turn introduced Dai Fujiwara to Bill Thurston. Thurston agreed to collaborate with Fujiwara, and the rest is history.
Japanese font failed. The book’s title, in roman characters, is “100nen no nanmon ha naze toketa no ka”, translated as “why the 100 year old difficult conjecture was proven”.