Antoinette Tordesillas

Antoinette A. Tordesillas is an Australian mathematician. She is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Melbourne, Australia who has helped build a foundational understanding of the dynamics of granular materials. She received the J H Michell Medal in 2000 and her major contributions include research predicting the response of extraterrestrial soil to attempts to build, mine, or drill and a model that can identify the location and time of future landslides or earthquakes by analyzing slope stability changes.

Education and career Tordesillas attended the University of Adelaide where she majored in applied mathematics and physical and inorganic chemistry and earned a B.S. in 1986. Her honours thesis in applied mathematics involved the development of a model of the hot-dip galvanising process for creating sheet metal. After temporary positions at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Kansas State University, she joined the University of Melbourne department of mathematics and statistics in 1996. She took on a joint position in geomechanics there in 2013 and was promoted to full professor in 2016.

At the University of Melbourne, Tordesillas teaches as the senior mathematics and statistics lecturer, heads the Micromechanics of Granular Media Group, and conducts research across the fields of mathematics, engineering, physics, and geophysics. This research has involved international collaborations, multidisciplinary teams, and large-scale projects funded by various international agencies including NASA, the Hong Kong Research Council, the US National Science Foundation, and the US Department of Defense.

Research

Understanding martian and lunar soil Tordesillas, in collaboration with NASA, led a team studying the soil of Mars and the moon with the aim of understanding how their surfaces would respond to attempts to build, mine, or drill. NASA approached Tordesillas at the recommendation of the US Army, who named her as the authority to consult about sand. This represents an important step towards predicting earthquakes and mitigating soil erosion from heavy off-road military vehicles. This model analyzes large quantities of data to identify sites of future failures, or sites of seismic activity. It flags locations where patterns of motion become ordered because, preceding seismic activity, particles begin moving in similar ways approaching the site of what will become a failure. This model analyzes slope stability data over time to predict the time and location of future failures, combining remote seismic data with the physics of granular failure. The World Intellectual Property Organization published that this patent covers a material processing method developed by the four scientists in which a material is fed between oppositely moving surfaces with the result of shearing the material parallel to its direction of flow between the two surfaces.

Publications According to the University of Melbourne website, as of April 2023 Tordesillas has published 167 scholarly articles with publication dates ranging from 1989 to 2023.