I go to a bookshop

and find that I am probably vain. Yesterday I saw 'Poincare's Prize" by George Szpiro and noticed that there was a reference to me and immediately bought the book to show off to my family. Strangely, at the time I wrote the paper, I was not particularly interested in the Poincare conjecture. Much earlier, I got hooked by mathematics after reading a popular book 'Men of Mathematics" by E.T. Bell. It soon became a passion and going to a research institute seemed an easy way of learning good mathes. I was not sure whether I could do a Ph.D. but it seemed one could always go back home and teach in some college. I kept reading what I liked and what I could understand and slowly one could find some problems in research papers and connect the dots. That seemed to be about it. While reading Papakyriokopoulos's paper, it occured to me that I could improve his conjecture and wrote a note. It did not take more than a week and since I was not particulaly interested in the conjecture, i left it at that. Somewhat later, I noticed that those conjectures had to be wrong since Papa's approach implied that every homology 3-sphere would be real 3-sphere. I was surprised that nobody mentioned it; may be it was due to respect and affection for Papa.
But as time went on, I found that I spent more time on research and less on reading. Problems kept bugging me and it was not always easy to prove what seemed to be correct. I found myself working 14-15 hours day trying to prove what should be correct. I became more and more specialized and by the time I realized the Poincare conjecture was part of a bigger programme, I did not have the strength or technolgy to either work on it or understand the solution when it appeared. So it goes.
By the way, the book is interesting, with many stories about Poincare and the origins of topology that I did not know.