The talk drew so many people the conference organizers worried about fire code regulations. Joanna Masingila, president of the North American chapter of the International Study Group on Ethnomathematics, said Eglash's research has shed light on a type of mathematical thinking and creativity that has often been ignored by western concepts of mathematics. Sometimes we're limited by our own ideas of what counts as mathematics. Eglash has now written a program for his Web site that allows students to interactively explore scaling models for a photograph of a corn-row hair style. One of the benefits of including familiar cultural icons in mathematics education is that it helps combat the notion of biological determinism, Eglash said.
Biological determinism is the theory that our thinking is limited by our racial genetics.
This theory gets reinforced every time a parent dismisses a child's poor math scores as nothing more than a continuation of bad math skills in the family, said Eglash. We repeat it even when we don't realize it. Eglash said using the African fractals research to combat the biological determinism myth benefits all students. It might make a difference for them to see that their heritage is also from the land of mathematics. Square shapes are a repeating theme in a Bororo parayer rug, above, from Cameroon.