Fractal Institute for APS Teachers

We’re offering Professional Development workshops for elementary teachers in Albuquerque to learn to use the ideas of fractals in their classrooms. The workshops will be offered twice, on March 15,16 and April 2,3.

Click for more info…

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!

World’s Largest Fractal Triangle - coming 3/14!

We’re building a giant fractal made of 2187 student-made triangles, and we need your help! “The Fractal Trianglethon” will be the world’s largest fractal triangle. It’s going to be 96 feet wide! We’ve reserved the Albuquerque Convention Center west complex ballroom for the whole day for this event on March 14th 2010. Please join us in the excitement and help build the giant fractal! Children and adults welcome.

Please email “Volunteers (at) FractalFoundation.org” to sign up for a shift!

Timeline:

• Shift 1: 8:30AM-12 noon: We build the giant Fractal!
• Shift 2: 12 noon - 3:00 PM:  We open the hall to the public at noon
• Shift 3: 3:00 - 6:00 PM:  Celebration and Clean up.

At 3:14 PM, we will officially certify the World Record, and take a group photo with as many kids as we can squeeze into the fractal.

At 3:30 we will move to the atrium and unveil the new student winners of the Albuquerque Fractal Challenge and present their awards.

At 5:00 we start cleaning up the fractal triangles.

The date of the World Record event, March 14th is mathematically significant. It’s known as Pi-day, and is celebrated all over the world by math-lovers. Even more appropriately, it is the birthday of Waclaw Sierpinski, the inventor of this fantastic triangle. What better birthday present than to have thousands of children build the world’s largest Sierpinski Triangle!

Many thanks to the Albuquerque Convention Center for generously donating the ballroom for this event!

Albuquerque Kids on “Research Rocks” (pt2)

Channel 7 recently featured several of Albuquerque’s brightest, most creative students on its “Research Rocks” segment. Two of the winners of the 2009 Albuquerque Fractal Challenge, and one of the 2008 winners (and her brother) were featured in the video explaining how they’ve been exploring fractals on computer to create amazing mathematical artworks.

The host, Byron Morton, even travels to Downtown ABQ to film Rachel Washington’s amazing gigantic public art fractal. Many thanks to Byron, KOAT Channel 7, and Intel for sponsoring “Research Rocks!”

Watch the Video here.

2009 - The Year in Fractals

We want to share some of the exciting developments of the last year for fractals in education and in our community in general. We’ve grown so much and passed so many milestones, it’s good to pause and reflect on them. It’s great what we’ve accomplished - but we need your help to do more!

Please make a tax-deductible DONATION to support science, math and art education.

Any donations received before midnight MST 12/31 will be tax-deductible for 2009.

THANKS!

And now, a look back at 2009:

• Over the course of the year, we taught ~6000 children and 2500 adults about the beauty of math and science, through fractals. All told, since 2003, we’ve taught over 27,000 kids and 17,000 adults. That’s a lot of excited, inspired, motivated people!
• We sold out all 36 First Friday Fractal planetarium shows (Now 131 total!) There were many reports of people buying ’scalped’ tickets at up to $20. Not that we encourage this, but it’s a testament to the show’s success and the public’s love of fractals.
• We installed the first downtown building wrap - a vision over 5 years in the making, thanks to a grant from Albuquerque’s Urban Enhancement Trust Fund. We also featured the winning student fractals from the Albuquerque Fractal Challenge on 20 billboards, thanks to the fantastic support from Clear Channel Outdoor. And look for more fractal billboards, and building wraps, soon!
• We received a $6540 Albuquerque Community Foundation grant - their third year of generously supporting our outreach efforts to teach fractals in local schools.
• We received a $5000 grant from Xilinx, for the second year in a row, to comprehensively teach the students, teachers and parents at Apache Elementary about fractals. We’re proud to be connected to this school, and this company.
• We received a $25,000 Summer Institute grant from the Public Education Department, which will help us teach 40 Albuquerque teachers science and math lessons, skills and projects, they can bring to their classes, using fractals. We can’t teach all the kids fractals ourselves, but by teaching the teachers, we have a chance to make a giant impact.
• We received $1000 grant from Sandia Labs /  Lockheed Martin - a great first partnership with a major local supporter of science and math education.
• We licensed fulldome fractal content to two planetariums (in Illinois and Pennsylvania), the first time we’ve played our super-successful fulldome fractals anywhere outside NM. We’ve established a content distributor partnership with Spitz Planetariums to help grow this business and spread fractals around the world.
• We had a two week outdoor fractal art installation at the NM State Fair, seen by over 500,000 visitors, and a booth where 24 wonderful volunteers taught fractals to thousands of children.
• We were featured on KOAT Channel 7 (thanks to Intel), in Albuquerque the Magazine, Around 505, New Mexico Journeys, and the Rio Grande Sun.
• We launched a facebook fanpage in our first foray into social networking, and have gained over 1100 fans since April. It’s a great forum for people to share their ideas about - and their love of - fractals.

This has indeed been a whirlwind year of growth and fractal activity. Thanks for your support in helping us reach ever more people with the beauty of math and science. Look for more about our future vision coming up.

And for now…

Next Page »