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.