John Freely


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

Life

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 the age of 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.

Academic life

Freely received his PhD in physics at New York University, and later pursued his postdoctoral studies 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 went in 1960 to Istanbul, Turkey, and took up a post at Robert College. He subsequently taught courses there in physics, the history of science and astronomy, including the course "The Emergence of Modern Science, East and West", with sojourns in New York City, Boston, London, Athens, Oxford, and Venice. He returned to Boğaziçi University in 1993.
Freely was the author of more than 40 books.

Works

Travel guides:
History and science books:
Wrote foreword:'