Freeman Dyson.

Freeman John Dyson was born on 15 December 1923 in Crowthorne, England to Mildred Atkey and George Dyson. He attended Twyford School and Winchester College before studying at the University of Cambridge. During World War II, he became a civilian technician with the Royal Air Force Bomber Command in 1941. This early exposure to military technology shaped his later interests in science and disarmament.

In 1947, Dyson came to the United States on a Commonwealth Fellowship as a graduate student in physics at Cornell University. The following year, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with J. Robert Oppenheimer. He returned to the Institute in 1953, where he remained for most of his career. Dyson contributed to quantum electrodynamics and proposed the Dyson sphere. He also appeared as himself in documentaries such as The Day After Trinity 1981 and The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer 2008.

Dyson married twice: first to Verena Esther Huber from 1950 to 1958, then to Imme Jung from 1958 onward. He had two children: Esther Dyson and George Dyson. Esther became a well-known investor and philanthropist, while George became a historian of technology. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1957.

Dyson received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1981 and the Templeton Prize in 2000. He was nominated for the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2015 for Enterprise and again in 2024 in the Education & Science category. His visionary ideas, such as the Dyson sphere, and his writings on science and society remain influential.