If you were teaching at a technical school trying to turn out better engineers, would you be studying cornrow hairstyles? May be you should. At Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, that's what assistant professor Ron Eglash does. Michael Hill (Associated Press) reported on it recently.

Back when he was a doctoral candidate, Eglash happened on an aerial photo of a Tanzanian village. It showed circular buildings in circular settings, and rectangular buildings in rectangular settings. This matched the definition of fractals: geometric patterns that are repeated at ever smaller scales to produce irregular shapes and surfaces that cannot be represented by classical geometry. Fractals are used especially in computer modeling of irregular patterns and structures in nature.

He traveled across Africa on a Fulbright grant investigating evidence of fractals in windscreens, carvings, and textiles. His book African Fractals was one result. A software program "Black Hairstyle Math", was another. Such studies fit under the new discipline ethnomath. Other researchers in this discipline have studied the Mayan calendar and Indian beadwork, with similarly startling results.

Eglash's software is working well among eighth-graders in an African-American classroom at a Chicago school. The teacher gets no resistance to assignments to graph cornrow patterns according to X and Y values on a grid. Who knew?

I guess we're just waiting for more attention-grabbers to come our way: the future may hold kids in your ethnic group and mine finally getting up to speed, with enthusiasm. May researchers make all due haste! (In the meantime, check out http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/frac/pages.html. It's an intro to fractals that's simple enough for me.)