Frank’s work helps crack open new avenues of thinking, new ways of understanding our world, and provides insights that help us better understand ourselves. What he is doing, in a nutshell, is exploring the relationship between geometric form and the dynamic principles that underlie the operations of natural and physiological processes, specifically those related to the human being. He did not set out with this goal in mind, but rather followed the trail of a simple question concerning the possibility of a seven-sided geometric form with faces of equal surface area. As a sculptor, Frank didn’t just think about this idea, he made it – “it” in this case being a new geometric form that had never before been discovered. The significance of this is not just that such a form exists, but that the form has meaningful relationships to other phenomenon which are unveiled through a particular way of engaging with the research process itself. In other words, the significance of Frank’s achievements lie equally in the realm of the process by which his discoveries were made as in the discoveries themselves. Frank’s work is moldbreaking in a very important way, and this is in terms of the process by which he does his work. The standard methods by which science builds upon itself have some significant blind spots and assumptions that have historically limited its potential (and created some nasty problems along the way, even while helping elsewhere). Most significantly, the methodologies used are generally designed to eliminate what is innately human from the research process, in an attempt to ‘control’ the situation so that results fit within the assumptions of the experimental design. This style of research provides a certain kind of answer: answers which are geared towards application through reductionistic analysis and control of component parts.

Such approaches, and the answers they provide, are proving to be less and less able to provide fruitful metaphors for a sustainable future. Frank’s work exemplifies an approach that helps bridge this entrenched gap, bringing forth a soulfully engaged style of research that weaves between art and science, allowing the strengths of each to fructify the weaknesses of the other. The result is an integrated style of research that can comfortably deal with both the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’, without over-privileging one or disparaging the other. In addition to this, his work is moldbreaking in that it constitutes a modern extension of the tradition of sacred geometry, providing a number of well-grounded insights that testify to the integration between humans and the laws of the cosmos.