John Freely was born in Brooklyn in 1926, served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946, graduated from Iona College, received a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from New York University, and did postdoctoral work at All Souls College, Oxford, England. He taught physics for more than fifty years at Bosphorus University—formerly Robert College—in Istanbul, where a building was recently named for him. He is the author of more than sixty books on Turkey, Greece, biographical figures, and the history of science. Freely died in 2017.
