William James Sidis (pronounced ; April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic abilities. His IQ was estimated to be between 250 and 300 (measures of IQ have changed over time since then) - one of the highest ever recorded - he entered Harvard early at age 11, and as an adult was conversant in over 40 languages and dialects. He became famous first for his precocity, and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from the public eye. He avoided mathematics entirely in later life, writing on other subjects under a number of pseudonyms.
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William James Sidis was born to Jewish Ukrainian immigrants on April 1, 1898, in New York City. His father Boris Sidis, Ph.D., M.D., had emigrated in 1887 to escape political persecution. His mother Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, M.D., and her family had fled the pogroms in 1889. Sarah attended Boston University and graduated from its School of Medicine in 1897.
William was named after his godfather, Boris' friend and colleague, the American philosopher William James. Boris earned his degrees at Harvard University, and taught psychology there. He was a psychiatrist, and published numerous books and articles, performing pioneering work in abnormal psychology. Boris was a polyglot and his son William would become one at a young age.
Sidis's parents believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, for which they were criticized. Sidis could read the New York Times at 18 months, had reportedly taught himself eight languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) by age eight, and invented another, which he called Vendergood.
Although the University had previously refused to let his father enroll him at age nine because he was still a child, Sidis set a record in 1909 by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard College. He was 11 years old, and entered Harvard as part of a program to enroll gifted students early. The experimental group included mathematician Norbert Wiener, Richard Buckminster Fuller, and composer Roger Sessions. In early 1910, Sidis's mastery of higher mathematics was such that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies. MIT professor Daniel F. Comstock predicted that Sidis would become a great mathematician and a leader in that science in the future. Sidis began taking a full-time course load in 1910 and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, on June 18, 1914, at age 16.
Shortly after graduation, he told reporters that he wanted to live the perfect life, which to him meant living in seclusion. He granted an interview to a reporter from the Boston Herald. The paper reported Sidis's vows to remain celibate and never to marry, as he said women did not appeal to him. Later he developed a strong affection for a young woman named Martha Foley. He later enrolled at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
After a group of Harvard students threatened Sidis physically, his parents secured him a job at the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas as a mathematics teaching assistant. He arrived at Rice in December 1915 at the age of 17. He was a graduate fellow working toward his doctorate.
Sidis taught three classes: Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, and trigonometry (he wrote a textbook for the Euclidean geometry course in Greek). After less than a year, frustrated with the department, his teaching requirements, and his treatment by students older than he was, Sidis left his post and returned to New England. When a friend later asked him why he had left, he replied, "I never knew why they gave me the job in the first place—I'm not much of a teacher. I didn't leave—I was asked to go." Sidis abandoned his pursuit of a graduate degree in mathematics and enrolled at the Harvard Law School in September 1916, but withdrew in good standing in his final year in March 1919.
In 1919, shortly after his withdrawal from law school, Sidis was arrested for participating in a socialist May Day parade in Boston that turned violent. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918. Sidis's arrest featured prominently in newspapers, as his early graduation from Harvard had garnered considerable local celebrity. During the trial, Sidis stated that he had been a conscientious objector of the World War I draft, and a socialist. (He later developed his own quasi-libertarian philosophy based on individual rights and "the American social continuity"). His father arranged with the district attorney to keep Sidis out of prison before his appeal came to trial; his parents, instead, held him in their sanatorium in New Hampshire for a year. They took him to California, where he spent another year. While at the sanatorium, his parents set about "reforming" him and threatened him with transfer to an insane asylum.
After returning to the East Coast in 1921, Sidis was determined to live an independent and private life. He only took work running adding machines or other fairly menial tasks. He worked in New York City and became estranged from his parents. It took years before he was cleared legally to return to Massachusetts, and he was concerned about his risk of arrest for years. He collected streetcar transfers, published periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history. In 1933, Sidis passed a Civil Service exam in New York but scored a low ranking of 254. Sidis called this "disappointing."
In 1944, Sidis won a settlement from The New Yorker for an article published in 1937. He had alleged it contained many false statements. Under the title "Where Are They Now?", the pseudonymous article described Sidis's life as lonely, in a "hall bedroom in Boston's shabby South End". Lower courts had dismissed Sidis as a public figure with no right to challenge personal publicity. He lost an appeal of an invasion of privacy lawsuit at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1940 over the same article. Judge Charles Edward Clark expressed sympathy for Sidis—who claimed that the publication had exposed him to "public scorn, ridicule, and contempt" and caused him "grievous mental anguish [and] humiliation"—but found that the court was not disposed to "afford to all the intimate details of private life an absolute immunity from the prying of the press".
Sidis died in 1944 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Boston at the age of 46. His father had died of the same malady in 1923 at age 56.
From writings on cosmology, to American Indian history, to a comprehensive and definitive taxonomy of vehicle transfers, an equally comprehensive study of civil engineering and vehicles, and several well-substantiated lost texts on anthropology, philology, and transportation systems, Sidis covered a broad range of subjects. Some of his ideas concerned cosmological reversibility, "social continuity," and individual rights in the United States.
In The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operated in reverse to the temporal direction that we experience in our local area. Everything outside of what we would today call a galaxy would be such a region. Sidis claimed that the matter in this region would not generate light. (These dark areas of the universe are not properly dark matter or black holes as they are used in contemporary cosmology.) This work on cosmology, based on his theory of reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics was the only book published under his name.
Sidis's The Tribes and the States (ca. 1935) employs the pseudonym "John W. Shattuck," giving a 100,000-year history of North America's inhabitants, from prehistoric times to 1828. In this text, he suggests that "there were red men at one time in Europe as well as in America."
Sidis was also a "peridromophile," a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. He wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers under the pseudonym of "Frank Folupa" that identified means of increasing public transport usage.
In 1930, Sidis was awarded a patent for a rotary perpetual calendar that took into account leap years.
Sidis created a constructed language called Vendergood in his second book, entitled Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at the age of eight. The language was mostly based on Latin and Greek, but also drew on German and French and other Romance languages. It distinguished between eight different moods: indicative, potential, imperative absolute, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, optative, and Sidis's own strongeable. Vendergood employed a base-12 system of numbers, because, as Sidis explained, "The unit in selling things is 12 of those things [dozens] and 12 is the smallest number that has four factors!"
Abraham Sperling, director of New York City's Aptitude Testing Institute, allegedly said after Sidis's death that according to his calculations, Sidis "easily had an IQ between 250 and 300", meaning that at some time his intellectual age was 2.5 to 3 times his actual age (not the same scale as modern deviation IQ). However, it was later acknowledged that some of his biographers, such as Amy Wallace, exaggerated how high his IQ actually was and exactly what Sperling had claimed. Sperling actually stated “Helena Sidis told me that a few years before his death, her brother Bill took an intelligence test with a psychologist. His score was the very highest that had ever been obtained. In terms of I.Q., the psychologist related that the figure would be between 250 and 300. Late in life William Sidis took general intelligence tests for Civil Service positions in New York and Boston. His phenomenal ratings are matter of record.” It has been acknowledged that Helena and William's mother Sarah had developed a reputation to exaggerate claims about the Sidis family. Helena had also falsely claimed that William scored an IQ of 254 on his Civil Service exam in 1933, when in fact he had only ranked 254, and that "Billy knew all the languages in the world, while my father only knew twenty-seven. I wonder if there were any Billy didn’t know."
Boris Sidis once dismissed tests of intelligence as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading." Sperling commented:
"What the journalists did not report, and perhaps did not know, was that during all the years of his obscure employments he was writing original treatises on history, government, economics and political affairs. In a visit to his mother's home I was permitted to see the contents of a trunkful of original manuscript material that Bill Sidis composed."
Sidis's life and work, particularly his ideas about Native Americans, are extensively discussed in Robert M. Pirsig's book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991). Sidis is also discussed in Ex-Prodigy, an autobiography by mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who was a prodigy himself and a contemporary of Sidis at Harvard.
A Danish author, Morten Brask, wrote a fictional novel based on Sidis' life; "The Perfect Life of William Sidis" was published in Denmark in 2009.
The debate about Sidis's manner of upbringing occurred within a larger discourse about the best way to educate children. Newspapers criticized Boris Sidis's child-rearing methods. Most educators of the day believed that schools should expose children to common experiences to create good citizens. Most psychologists thought intelligence was hereditary—a position that precluded early childhood education at home.
The difficulties Sidis encountered in dealing with the social structure of a collegiate setting may have shaped opinion against allowing such children to rapidly advance through higher education in his day. Research indicates that a challenging curriculum can relieve social and emotional difficulties commonly experienced by gifted children. Embracing these findings, several colleges now have procedures for early entrance. The Davidson Institute for Talent Development has developed a guidebook on the topic.
Sidis was portrayed derisively in the press of the day. The New York Times, for example, described him as "a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment." His mother later maintained that newspaper accounts of her son bore little resemblance to him.
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