Fractals Come to Escuela del Sol and Harwood Art Center

The Fractal Foundation is pleased to announce the newest public art installation of a winning fractal from the Albuquerque Fractal Challenge. An 8′x12′ banner was installed on the west-face of the Harwood Art Center at 7th and Mountain Rd in downtown Albuquerque. Congratulations to Lauren Lopez, the featured artist!

In addition, the students of the affiliated Escuela del Sol were given a fractal presentation inside the building, and then they eagerly made fractal triangles and tetrahedrons.

Fractals at the NM State Legislature

For the 3′d year in a row, the Fractal Foundation had an interactive booth at “Math & Science Day” at the NM State Legislature in Santa Fe. The event was huge success and featured about a dozen educational organizations from around the state.
At our table, we taught hundreds of children and adults about fractals, and we collected 87 new student fractal triangles made by students, to be part of the Fractal Trianglethon project.

Many thanks to the legislators who spent some time talking about math and science education and who learned a little bit about fractals! Thanks also to Innovate Educate NM for hosting a delightful cocktail party where we could all mingle afterwards.

Fractal Patterns Seen in Semiconductor Magnetism

Fractal patterns have been observed for the first time at the quantum scale, and the implications - and applications - may be huge.

Mathematicians and physicists have known for some time that the equations that govern the magnetic phase-transition of metals will produce fractal patterns when iterated in a computer. But until now, nobody had ever seen actual fractal patterns at the nanoscale before. Now, in a serendipitous discovery, “fractal puddles” have been observed in the magnetization of semiconductors, and the discovery may lay the foundation for the emerging area of “spintronic” devices.
Read more:
Princeton University announcement
PhysicsWorld
Science Magazine (original peer-reviewed paper, full article requires $)

Incidentally, an equation that describes magnetic phase transitions (an ising model) is shown below, and when iterated in the complex plane, this equation produces beautiful fractal patterns… which include little Mandelbrot Set replicas!