Having established Albuquerque as the fractal capital of the world, the Fractal Man said hopes to use fractals to revolutionize the way kids learn science and math worldwide.
Fractals are infinitely repeating patterns that are self-similar at all scales, said Jonathan Wolfe, the Fractal Man and founder of the Fractal Foundation.
“What we want to do as enlightened leaders of society is make the smallest possible change to a complex system that will guide it in the right direction,” he said. “We can’t take a brute force approach, but we can harness that power of self-organization to make small changes early on in the evolution of a system.”
During the past few months, Wolfe said he has done fractal sermons at local churches. He said it is spiritually empowering for people to learn they are not an insignificant link in a 7-billion-person chain.
“I jokingly say now that I preach the fractal,” he said. “What I’m trying to get at is that there’s some innate, inherent life force, if you will, or self-organizing power that has simple processes (that) cause complex behaviors, complex structures.”
At the First Friday Fractal show at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science — which has sold out 202 times — Wolfe projects a computerized image of fractals. According to Wolfe, audiences take a ride into psychedelic infinity accompanied by music produced by Daniel Wolfe.
Wolfe said he is pioneering fractal-based education, which combines principles of science, math and art.
Patricia Valderrama, a UNM student and volunteer at the Fractal Foundation, said zooming into fractals makes you contemplate infinity, a universal fascination.
“Everywhere people come in contact with fractals, they just fall in love,” Valderrama said. “So I think that it’s easy, it’s just a matter of little groups of people expanding and expanding.”
Jonathan Wolfe, a Ph.D. in visual neuroscience, said fractals are the key to involving kids in math and science because the fractals are a visual way to learn the concept.
He said his goal is to make Albuquerque the source of fractal information and resources for teachers and planetariums to pass on his teaching.
He said he envisions a four-story, fractal architecture building.
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From the ground up, his plan for each floor of the building represents a different level of education, from local to international in scope. He said he estimates that executing this will cost $50-$100 million.
“There are people who … want America to thrive and realize that to do so, we have to do a better job of educating people in math and science,” Jonathan Wolfe said. “For somebody who’s a billionaire and who wants to change the world, we can let them do that by funding the Fractal Foundation.”
Since he established the Foundation in 2003, he has taught fractals to more than 35,000 students and 24,000 adults, including 623 teachers in New Mexico alone. For the past three or four years, Jonathan Wolfe said he’s traveled all over the world giving lectures on fractals, discovering along the way that many others share his belief in the power of fractals.
He wants the building to house a public policy think tank, which he said would simulate and study small changes in political and social systems with computer software to better inform leaders.
“I have a lot of visionary leadership ideas that I’d like to apply in the political realm, but I don’t want to spend my life running for office; too many compromises involved in that,” he said.
“Right now, public policy decisions are based on who puts the most money into the conversation. It works for a small, limited interest, but it doesn’t work for society at large.”
Once he can employ enough people to handle administrative duties, Jonathan Wolfe said he wants to lead a team of educators on a world tour in his fractal-themed hot air balloons.
“My goal is not to turn everybody into a fractal artist,” he said. “I want people to think critically and creatively, scientifically rigorous and innovatively, creatively putting together pieces of the puzzle in new ways they haven’t seen before.”
