A Life in Mathematical Physics: Conference in Honour of Tekin Dereli

Abstract 1. Introduction The friends and colleagues of Prof. Dr. Tekin Dereli came together to celebrate his 72nd birthday and the 50th year of his mathematical physics career. The three-days event took place online over the Zoom on 26-28 November 2021. His scientific and scholarly achievements, his kindness as a colleague, his thoughtful guidance of students and his service to the physics community in Turkey as a whole and last but not the least his open and easy accessibility to anyone needing his expert counseling have been appreciated by all. ¨ We are grateful to the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA) for sponsoring the online, open-access publication of the proceedings as a special issue in The Journal of Physics: Conference Series. 2. Biography of Tekin Dereli Tekin Dereli was born in Ankara in 1949 where he completed his early education at Ankara Science High School in 1967. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in physics with high honors in 1971 at the Middle East Technical University (METU), where he also completed his PhD in 1976, with a thesis entitled “Fermions in Yang-Mills Potentials”. He gave his habilitation in 1981 with a thesis on “Dynamics of Neutrinos in Gravitational Fields” (in Turkish). His academic career began at METU as an instructor in 1973, where he later became an associate professor. He was promoted to professorship in 1987 at Ankara University and then returned to METU in 1993. He was invited to Ko¸c University as Professor of Physics in 2001 where he worked till 2021. Tekin Dereli held various research positions abroad, being always on-leave from METU. These include a visiting scientist position at Yale University during 1974-1975 under the hosting of Feza Gürsey and a research associate position at Brandeis University during 1976-1977 under the hosting of Stanley Deser. He collaborated with Peter C. Aichelburg as Einstein-Memorial Foundation Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Vienna during 1977-1978. He was SRC Research Associate at Lancaster University between 1979-1981 where a long and fruitful collaboration with Robin W. Tucker has begun. He had been an Associate Member of ICTP between 1986-1991 and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Karlsruhe University during 1988-1989 under the hosting of Julius Wess. Tekin Dereli’s research interests cover a broad range of subjects. He published papers on magnetic monopoles in Yang-Mills gauge field theories, supersymmetry and supergravity, the role of quaternions and octonions in physics. He studied Clifford algebras and spin structures associated with the space-time. He worked on generalised theories of gravity, both in higher and lower dimensions than four, emphasizing their differential geometric gauge structure. In particular he investigated various aspects of black hole and gravitational wave solutions. Furthermore he constructed higher dimensional cosmological models. Tekin Dereli also worked on dualities in physics and mathematics in general and deformation quantisation in the context of the Landau problem. List of Scientific Bibliography of Tekin Dereli (1975-2021), Theses Supervised by Tekin Dereli, Alphabetical List of Contributors, Organising Committee are available in this pdf.