That's very true - good point. I wonder what it would actually cost to make this much of a public statement if he spent the money directly that way - maybe it is comparable.
Oh, probably more. How much does human interest cost? This has captured quite a few people's attention, especially considering it's catching people not in mathematics.
I couldn't resist thinking about this a bit more. Something comparable would be firefox's double-page New York Times ad, which apparently cost about $200k (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007103.html) and certainly reached a lot of non-mathematicians.
Even though Perelman's action has generated quite a bit of press attention, my gut feeling is he could have paid for even more attention if he chose to use the prize money to raise awareness directly.
That said, if he really wanted to get maximum exposure, he could continue to ignore the prize for almost a year, but accept it at the last minute and then spend it all on ads telling the world how corrupt academic mathematics is ;)
A point that non-mathematicians will never understand! I used to always correct people by saying, "No, you mean arithmetic," until I realized how hopelessly pedantic it was.
Firefox though went from a fairly large amount of people to a fair amount larger amount of people. I'll bet this guy went from 4-digit people knowing (of) him to 7 or more digits.
I'd think generating interest from something minute would be harder than from something a lot of people have at least heard of.
