John Freely

Who is John Freely?

John Freely is an American physicist, teacher, and author of popular travel and history books on Istanbul, Athens, Venice, Turkey, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire. He is the father of writer and Turkish-to-English literary translator Maureen Freely.

Freely was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up there and in Ireland. He dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Navy at age 17 for the last two years of World War II, serving with a commando unit in Burma and China. He did his undergraduate work at the traditional American Catholic college, Iona College in New Rochelle, New York, under the G.I. Bill.

Freely completed his postdoctoral study at Oxford University under Alistair Cameron Crombie, the pioneering researcher in the history of Medieval European science. The principal idea he inherited from Crombie was "the continuity of western European science from the Dark Ages through Copernicus, Galileo and Newton". Following his postdoctoral work, he taught courses in history and astronomy at the Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, including the course, "The Emergence of Modern Science, East and West".