Wild About Math! Making Math fun and accessible

Fractal Foundation fun

In my neck of the woods in northern New Mexico, the Fractal Foundation lives the mission of inspiring interest in science, Math, and Art through the beauty of fractals. The Foundation puts on fractal-related programs in schools and takes them on the road. The Foundation also sponsors a very popular First Friday Fractals night, on the first Friday of the month, for locals and tourists at the planetarium of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.

At the Foundation's website are some nice fractal-related resources, many of them free.

• The Fractal Software page has a great fractal viewer (runs on Windows and Mac) that lets you pick from 23 different fractal patterns and zoom in. This one is great fun.
• On the same page there is also a program called "Electric Sheep" that seems to be like the SETI At Home project, but for fractals. For those of you who don't know, SETI At Home is a collaborative effort among millions of PCs to find extraterrestrial life by using some of the compute power in each cooperating PC to analyze signals from space looking for patterns. The idea is that when your computer is idle, like at night, it can give some computer time to the SETI project. Well, Electric Sheep does something similar for fractals. I've not downloaded it but the idea of collaborative fractal building sounds fascinating.
• And, there's "Fractal Grower" (same page) that lets you create certain kinds of fractal patterns.
• There are a half dozen fractal videos at the Fractal Video page. I downloaded the first one, named Glomey, which is 3 minutes 20 seconds long and found the video plus accompanying music to be absolutely mesmerizing.
• The Fractal Art page has some beautiful fractals.

Check out the site. There's a fractal store, a page on chaos theory, and more.

Have fun!