Ron Eglash used cornrow hairstyle to teach fractals in a math class:
Our first design tool was developed for the "African Fractals" project (Eglash 1999). Mathematics teachers with large African American student populations reported that they could not use fractals -- there was too much pressure to conform to the standard curriculum -- and that they felt that many of the examples were too culturally distant from the students. They all felt that the examples of hairstyles would work well however. Thus our first tool focused on the hairstyles, and used the term "iterative transformational geometry" rather than "fractals." The graphic above shows the result, called "Cornrow Curves."
http://diac.cpsr.org/cgi-bin/diac02/pattern.cgi/public?pattern_id=494 (via Boing Boing)