Dr. Elena Vasquez, PhD
Mathematician
Translating rigorous geometric theory into accurate, reliable calculation tools trusted by engineers, students, and researchers worldwide.
Dr. Elena Vasquez is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, where she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in geometry, topology, and mathematical analysis for nearly a decade. Her doctoral research at the Universidade de Lisboa focused on curvature properties of Riemannian manifolds, and her subsequent work at CAMGSD extended those foundations into applied settings, examining how classical geometric results translate into computational methods used by engineers, architects, and surveyors. She has authored or co-authored more than 30 peer-reviewed papers, with her most cited work addressing angle defect in polyhedral surfaces and its implications for 3D mesh algorithms.
At OnlyCalculators, Dr. Vasquez authors and reviews tools covering two-dimensional and three-dimensional geometry, trigonometry, and angle relationships. She is responsible for ensuring that formulas are derived correctly from first principles, that edge cases, such as degenerate triangles, obtuse-angle configurations, and near-zero inputs, are handled without silent errors, and that results are expressed in units and precision levels appropriate for the intended use. Her calculators are regularly cited in university course materials at institutions across Portugal, Brazil, and Spain, and her angle-conversion tools are embedded in several open-source CAD workflows.
Beyond her academic and editorial work, Dr. Vasquez consults periodically for civil engineering firms on geometric modeling problems, particularly those involving terrain cross-sections and structural load distribution. She spent a semester as a visiting lecturer at EPFL in Lausanne, collaborating with the computational architecture group on parametric surface design. That applied exposure informs the practical framing she brings to every calculator she reviews: the numbers must not only be mathematically correct but immediately usable by someone on a construction site or at a drafting table.
“Every formula is derived from first principles and stress-tested against known degenerate cases before it reaches a user, because a calculation that fails silently is worse than no calculation at all.”