William James Sidis biography. William James Sidis - the most gifted man on the planet



Sidis, William James

Sidis, William James

Teaching activity and further education (1915-1919)

After a group of Harvard students began to threaten Sidis with physical harm, Sidis's parents, in order to protect him, found a position for their son as an assistant professor of mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. William began work in December 1915, aged 17. He taught courses in Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry and trigonometry. (He himself wrote a textbook on Euclidean geometry in Greek). But less than a year later, disillusioned with his work and the poor attitude of students who were older than him, William returned to New England. In September 1916, Sidis entered Harvard Law School, but did not graduate, interrupting his studies in his final year in March 1919.

Politics and arrest (1919-1921)

In 1919, shortly after Sidis left law school, he was arrested for participating in a May Day demonstration in Boston and sentenced to 18 months in prison. The arrest of one of Harvard's youngest graduates was widely reported in the press and quickly made Sidis a local celebrity. During the trial, Sidis called himself a socialist and stated that he refused to be drafted into the First World War for ideological reasons. (He later developed his own quasi-liberal theory, based on individual rights and "American social integrity"). But Sidis' father managed to convince the district attorney not to send William to serve his sentence. Instead, his parents sent him to a sanitarium in New Hampshire for a year and took him with them to California the following year. They began to insist that he change, otherwise they threatened to send their son to an insane asylum.

Later years (1921-1944)

Publications and research topics

Fields of study on which Sidis's work remains include American history, cosmology, and psychology. Sidis was a collector of railway tickets and was immersed in the study of transport systems. Under the pseudonym "Frank Falupa", he wrote a treatise on rail tickets, in which he identified ways to increase the capacity of the transport network that are only now beginning to find acceptance. In 1930, he received a patent for a permanent perpetual calendar that took leap years into account.

Sidis was socially passive. At a young age, he decided to give up sex and devote his life to intellectual development. His interests manifested themselves in rather exotic forms. He wrote a study on alternative US history. He spent his adult life working as a simple accountant, wearing traditional rural clothing, and quitting his job as soon as his genius was discovered. Trying to live unnoticed, he hid from journalists.

Grade

W. J. Sidis is rated by some biographers as the most gifted man on Earth. Here are the biographical moments that gave rise to this opinion:

• William learned to write by the end of his first year.
• In his fourth year of life, he read Homer in the original.
• At the age of six he studied Aristotelian logic.
• Between the ages of 4 and 8 he wrote 4 books, including one monograph on anatomy.
• At the age of seven he passed the Harvard Medical School exam in anatomy.
• By the age of 8, William knew 8 languages ​​- English, Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, French, German and one more, which he invented himself.
• In his adult life, William was fluent in 40 languages, and, according to some authors, this number reached 200.
• At the age of 11, Sidis entered Harvard University and soon lectured at the Harvard Mathematical Club.
• He graduated from Harvard with honors at age 16.

Some critically use the example of W. J. Sidis as the most significant example of how child prodigies are at risk of not achieving success in adulthood.

Notes

Literature

• Wallace, Amy The Prodigy: A biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1986.

But the smartest boy in the world had only one desire: he wanted to be just like the other children.

It is known that his IQ was much higher than that of Albert Einstein, but despite the fact that both mathematical geniuses lived at the same time, few people today know who William James Sidis was.

The explanation probably lay within himself: the quiet boy from New York didn't want to attract a lot of noise. He wanted most of all to live a very ordinary life and to be left alone.

And that’s exactly how it all ended: in a broken-down apartment, in a low-paying office job.

More than 80 years later, speculation has begun about whether William James suffered from autism - but we will probably never know why the world's smartest man chose to go into hiding. The only thing that is certain is that everything could have gone differently.

After all, everything started out so well.

Read a newspaper at 18 months

William James Sidis was only six months old when his parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants, realized that their son was not like other children. Even then he began to speak. His first words were “door” and “moon”.

Less than a year later, he was already making his way through the texts of the newspaper, syllable by syllable.

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Focus.pl 01/09/2016 Of course, both parents had higher education and were intellectuals. Mom Sarah studied medicine at Boston University, and dad Boris worked as a psychiatrist and wrote several books on psychopathology during his life.

But William James's gift was of a different order: an intellect the likes of which the world had never seen before.

In addition, in the first years of his life he absorbed knowledge very voraciously. Just five years old, William James already spoke Russian, French, German and English. A year later, I also learned Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

Much later—after he had mastered some 40 different languages ​​and had come up with his own, Vendergood—he said that he learned a completely new language in just one day.

But despite his incredible ability for languages, William was most interested in mathematics. By the time he was eight years old, he had already written four books on anatomy, astronomy, mathematics and grammar. In addition, that same year he successfully passed the entrance examination to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I devoted every minute to studying

American newspapers, of course, praised the young genius and spent tons of paper describing his incomprehensible intellect. Dad Boris gave an interview and is said to have said that his son’s successes are associated with only one thing - hard work. He believed that education should begin early, preferably before the age of two, and that the basis of a boy’s talent lay in hard and disciplined work.

William James himself didn't say much. Those around him described him as an unobtrusive and solitary child who devoted every waking moment to studying and learning new things. He was not interested in playing, playing sports or walking in nature.

When William James turned 11, he began his studies at Harvard University. Dad Boris spent two years lobbying the university to accept his son, who completed the seventh grade program in six months. But according to university policy, children were not accepted there, which led to criticism from the public. In 1909, the university gave in and accepted its youngest student in history as part of a program designed to provide early education to its brightest students.

On June 18, 1914, William James defended his Ph.D. thesis at the age of just 16—and instead of continuing, he suddenly began studying law at Harvard Law School. This surprised everyone. No one, least of all Father Boris, could understand what happened.

"I'm sick of math"

But William James explained the change in his life's path by saying that his interest in mathematics had waned. In a 1937 newspaper article, he says: “The very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill. All I want to do is just work on my adding machine, but they (the press) won’t leave me alone.”

William James never completed his legal education. Instead, he hid from the world.

The American media were unmerciful to the former prodigy. He was now described as "maladjusted". When William James did make a brave attempt to teach mathematics, his students bullied him cruelly, believing him to be emotionally retarded.

William James fled from the world. But this hardly helped. The American media never stopped hounding him and stubbornly continued to speculate why the “Harvard genius” suddenly turned into a second-class citizen.

Immature and unloving parents

When he became interested in politics, he was considered a left-wing radical and faced prison. Pope Boris intervened and made sure that the sentence was overturned. But that didn't help much. William James developed something of a chronic resentment towards his father, blaming him for his abnormal life. Towards the end of his life, the former child prodigy cut off all ties with his family and lived completely isolated. In the end, he left the apartment only to go to work as a low-paid clerk.

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Scientific American 02/23/2014 Much later, his mother accused the American media of trying and failing to prove that her son was crazy. She continued to claim that it was because of the press that William James hid from the world. Many journalists, on the contrary, stated that Boris’s strict discipline harmed him. And at least one relative subsequently accused both parents of putting too much pressure on their son and exploiting him at an early age.

William James' parents were also described as immature and unloving. And the child himself was called an “experiment.” It was also said that the little prodigy was exhausted and sick due to all the commotion around him.

But the world will never know what really happened and why the life of the smartest child in the world turned out so tragically.

In any case, it is clear that neither before nor after William James there was a person with a higher IQ.

His IQ ranged between 250 and 300.

Communities of smart people

The average person's IQ is approximately 100. Those with an IQ of less than 85 are considered "less gifted." (mentally retarded - ed.), and people with an IQ over 115 are “especially smart.”

To join Mensa, an international organization for smart people, you need to have an IQ of at least 131; about 2% of the world's population has it.

Famous members of Mensa include Jodie Foster, Joyce Carol Oates and Steve Martin.

Giga Society is the name of a community of people with an IQ of more than 196, that is, only one billionth of the world's population. One of the nine members of this society is Swede Andreas Gunnarsson from Gothenburg.

The smartest people in history

IQ 250+: William James Sidis (1898-1944)

IQ 210: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832. German writer, politician and scientist.

IQ 190: Garry Kasparov (born 1963). Russian world chess champion, politician and writer.

IQ 186: Marilyn Vos Savant, born 1946. American writer and journalist.

IQ 180: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Italian multigenius.

IQ 180: Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642. Italian astronomer. Founder of modern astronomy.

IQ 170: Paul Allen (born 1953) American investor and philanthropist, founded Microsoft with Bill Gates.

IQ 165: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). Austrian composer.

IQ 160: Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Author of the theory of relativity.

IQ 160: Dolph Lundgren, born 1957. Swedish actor, chemical engineer by training.

IQ 160: Bill Gates (b. 1955). American IT entrepreneur, founder of Microsoft, multimillionaire.

IQ 156: Olof Palme (1927-1986). Prime Minister of Sweden.

IQ 145: Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821). French statesman and commander.

IQ 140: Shakira (born 1977). Colombian singer and producer.

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.

Does a genius belong to himself or are his abilities the property of society? How free is a naturally gifted person?

Reading about the life of the most famous child prodigy of the early twentieth century, William James Sidis, it is impossible not to ask yourself these questions. All his life he dreamed of only one thing: to be left alone - but he never got what he wanted.

At one year old, baby William was already reading newspapers, and by six, he knew eight foreign languages. He became the youngest student in Harvard history, enrolling there at just 11 years old. Apparently, this year became a turning point in his fate - since then he could not take a single step without the attention of annoying reporters. At the age of 16, after graduating from Harvard, William remained to work as a teacher - it would seem the beginning of a brilliant career.

His IQ was simply fantastic - reaching 250-300 points. But with such a colossal intellect, William Sidis did not know how to communicate with people at all.

William was born in 1898 to Boris and Sarah Sidis, Jewish immigrants from Russia.

Settling in New York and possessing extraordinary abilities, his parents quickly became famous. Boris became a pioneer in the study of psychology, receiving a degree from Harvard University and teaching psychopathology there. Sarah graduated from Boston University School of Medicine, but gave up her career two years later due to the birth of their son, William.

Although, perhaps, the child became the main object of research by two extraordinary parents.

To raise William, they used innovative methods of psychology for that time. The parents decided not to put off the issue of education, and literally from the first months of his life, William’s child’s brain began to absorb information in unimaginable volumes.

They began to study the alphabet, as in many families, on wooden cubes, with the only difference that the father put the boy into a hypnotic state so that he would repeat the letters after him.

At six months the baby was able to pronounce the first two words. And not the usual “mom” and “dad,” but door and moon.

At eight months, he was not only able to eat from a spoon on his own, but also recognized all the letters on the blocks.

At one and a half years old, he read a newspaper aloud, and instead of the usual development of motor skills on toys, he typed text on a typewriter.

At the age of five, the baby learned Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Russian, French and German.

And at the age of six, a photograph of William, who entered school and mastered the entire class curriculum in six months, appeared on the front page of the New York Times.

When the child was 9, his father tried to convince Harvard officials that his son was ready to enroll, but they were skeptical about the idea of ​​a nine-year-old boy becoming a student at a respected university.

Nevertheless, already at the age of 11, William Sidis, whose IQ, according to some sources, was estimated even higher than that of Albert Einstein, was accepted into the university.

But entering Harvard brought the boy fame for which he was not prepared.

Emotional unpreparedness, reporters scurrying on his heels, savoring every detail of his personal life and a banal lack of communication skills even with peers, not to mention fellow students, led to his first nervous breakdown in 1910.

William was placed in a sanatorium. The withdrawn teenager, who had not previously been very active, returned from there completely depressed.

He nevertheless graduated from Harvard at the age of 16, remaining there as a teacher. But the students were not attracted by the course of lectures given to them - they were exclusively interested in the details of the personal life of their teacher, who was younger than many of them in age. And when, in a conversation with one of his students, Sidis admitted that he had never kissed, he became the object of ridicule, which soon reached the press.

During one of the reporters' attacks, William, unable to bear it, shouted to all those gathered: “I want to live in solitude, I hate you and I hate the crowd!”

True, he still joined the crowd. More precisely, to the 1919 demonstration in Boston, which turned into a riot. Thanks to the efforts of his parents, his two-year prison sentence was replaced by house arrest, during which his parents sent him to a “sanatorium.”

After leaving it, he no longer communicated with his parents. Trying not to stand out from the crowd, William traveled all over America, getting work either as a clerk or as an accountant, but he worked everywhere until one of his colleagues noticed his super talent.

The numbers easily fit into his mind, and he gave out the final data without hours of thinking, calculations and calculators, which he, they say, simply hated. After all, now the technology was doing the work for him, which everyone had previously admired. And he himself could not understand where to apply his own knowledge.

Therefore, when reporters appeared at the threshold of his office and always asked approximately the same thing: “What has your mind given you and what have you achieved?” - he collected his things and, running away from them, settled again in some wilderness until the next discovery.

At the age of 30, he already knew more than forty languages, although some argue that all 200, worked on alternative American history, and touched upon the fields of cosmology and psychology. He patented a permanent perpetual calendar that took leap years into account.

After all, a woman played a tragic role in his life.

Small experiments in communicating with the people around him always ended unsuccessfully. And suddenly she appeared.

Unlike the others, she did not avoid him and smiled when they met, she spoke up herself and kept up the conversation with topics that, although she did not understand, she did not get bored with them.

He tried to spend all his free time from work with her. He even planned to invite her home for a birthday party he hadn't had in probably decades.

But shortly before him she disappeared. And then an article came out that made him look like a fool in front of all of America.

For several years he sued the publication, proving that the published article was libel. Or maybe he argued with her and her grades.

The first person in the world whom he trusted called him a gloomy and clumsy biryuk, who did not know how to behave in society, and ridiculed everything from his hobbies to his physical characteristics.

Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 46 in his lonely rented apartment.

The obituaries published after his death on July 17, 1944 did not analyze the reasons for his sudden death. And their content varied depending on the preferences of the target audience. Some were limited to only a short list of his biography and individual moments from the past, which until a certain point was followed by almost half of the country's population. Others were published under the headlines: “The brain explosion of a famous prodigy” or “William Sidis has proven that an IQ above 150 leads to death.”

The most gifted person on Earth

W. J. Sidis is rated by some biographers as the most gifted man on Earth.

Here are the biographical moments that gave rise to this opinion:

• William learned to write by the end of his first year.
• In his fourth year of life, he read Homer in the original.
• At the age of six he studied Aristotelian logic.
• Between the ages of 4 and 8 he wrote 4 books, including one monograph on anatomy.
• At the age of seven he passed the Harvard Medical School exam in anatomy.
• By the age of 8, William knew 8 languages ​​- English, Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, French, German and one more, which he invented himself.
• In his adult life, William was fluent in 40 languages, and, according to some authors, this number reached 200.
• At the age of 11 he entered Harvard University and soon was lecturing at the Harvard Mathematical Club.
• He graduated from Harvard with honors at age 16. published .

If you have any questions about this topic, ask them to the experts and readers of our project .

P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness, we are changing the world together! © econet

William James Sidis was the most famous child prodigy of the early 20th century. He became the youngest student in Harvard history - the boy was only 11 years old. And since then he could not take a single step without the attention of annoying reporters. They said about him that already at the age of 6 he knew eight languages, and his IQ reached a fantastic 250-300 points. But the world never received great discoveries from Sidis: in search of solitude, the young man was forced to hide from the press, working in low-paid positions.

The boy was born into a family of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His father Boris Sidis fled political persecution to New York in 1886. He graduated from Harvard University and taught psychology there. Born on April 1, 1898, the son of Boris and Sarah Sidis was named after his godfather, the American philosopher William James.

Sidis Sr.'s area of ​​scientific interest was psychopathology. As soon as William learned to speak, he became the subject of his father's experiments. From an early age, Boris taught his son to write and read, and at 1.5 years old the baby could already read The New York Times newspaper.
By the age of two and a half, William could type in English and French.

At the age of five, the boy could reproduce from memory all the departure times of trains according to directions in a complex railway schedule.

At the age of nine, William developed a logarithmic number system with base 12 instead of decimal. The proud father wrote about his son's achievements in scientific journals. In 1911, the book Philistine and Genius was published, in which Sidis criticized the American education system, citing his son's abilities as an illustration of the advantages of home schooling.

At the time of publication of the book, William was already well known in the United States. At the age of six, his parents sent the boy to a public school in Brooklyn, and William completed a seven-year school curriculum in six months, attracting the attention of major Boston newspapers.
When he managed to graduate from high school almost as quickly, reporters began to pursue him. But William Sidis received real publicity when he entered Harvard University at the age of nine.

The management did not consider it possible to allow him to take classes at such a young age and agreed to accept him only after two years, in the hope that the boy would already be mature enough. At the age of 11, Sidis was mature enough to give a lecture on four-dimensional space at the Harvard Mathematical Club.

Sixteen-year-old William James Sidis, 1914 / Photo: ru.wikipedia.org

William's story was on the front pages of every national newspaper. Journalists vied with each other to predict the great discoveries that the child prodigy would make, and debated on the topic of sociogenetism and biogenetism. Participants in numerous discussions were divided into two camps: some believed that Sidis had an outstanding mind by nature, others that this was the merit of his father, whose innovative methods of education from an early age taught the boy to think energetically. Hundreds of newspaper articles published between 1910 and 1912 used Sidis as an example to argue that public free schools were a waste of time that did more harm to the child than good.

Many feared for the boy’s mental and physical health, some condemned his father for depriving the child of his childhood. The article “Popular Misconceptions Concerning Early Childhood Development,” published in the journal Science in 1910, expressed fears that, through the example of Sidis, other parents would begin to raise their own geniuses and traumatize their children.

If Sidis Sr. deprived William of his childhood, then the constant discussion of his life in the press had a much more detrimental effect on his health

In 1910, the boy had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a sanatorium. Sidis returned to Harvard withdrawn and depressed; he no longer gave lectures and avoided close contact with people. In the summer of 1914, the young man received a Bachelor of Arts diploma.

The journalists did not think of easing their pressure on the unfortunate genius. During an interview with the Boston Herald, a reporter pressed 16-year-old Sidis for details of his sex life. The sensation that the child prodigy had taken a vow of celibacy appeared in The New York Times, after which the whole of America mocked Sidis’s personal life.

In late 1915, Sidis began teaching mathematics at William Marsh Rice University in Houston, Texas, while working on his doctorate. No one was going to give the young scientist the desired solitude. Major newspapers on the East Coast regularly wrote about his blunders, snidely noting his bad manners, his inability to treat women, and his bullying from students. Frustrated, Sidis returned to Boston and entered Harvard Law School, but dropped out in his third year.

An article about Sidis in one of the magazines, April 1987 / Photo: sidis.net

In 1919, as fear of the Red Scare began to grow in the United States, William was arrested for participating in a socialist demonstration in which he carried a red flag. The young man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for inciting rebellion, but Sidis Sr. made a deal with the prosecution, and he remained free. The arrest and the resulting surge of interest in his personal life again greatly frayed Sidis’ nerves.
Hoping to hide from public attention, he abandoned science and often moved from one city to another under different names, working as an ordinary clerk.

In 1924, a reporter from The New York Herald Tribune managed to find him in one of the offices on Wall Street. “The child prodigy of 1909 now works as an adding machine operator for $23 a week,” newspapers wrote about Sidis’s ingloriously withered abilities.

After this, “the smartest man in the world” managed to disappear from the radars of journalists for more than ten years. He led a quiet, comfortable existence away from the spotlight and wrote novels. Sidis's main hobbies were collecting tram tickets and studying the life of one of the Native American tribes. He reacted to any questions about his brilliant past with incredible irritation. In 1927, Sidis refused to go to his father's funeral.

The fortress of anonymity that the prodigy had built around himself collapsed in 1937. He had the imprudence to give an interview to his friend, which formed the basis of the material for the New Yorker magazine. Sidis became the hero of the series “Where Are They Now?”, dedicated to famous people who disappeared from view for a long time. The article portrayed Sidis as “an overweight man with a prominent jaw, a rather thick neck and a reddish mustache,” clumsy and childishly irresponsible, who could not immediately find the words to express his thoughts.

Offended to the core, Sidis sued the New Yorker for invasion of privacy. The court concluded that he is a public figure, and therefore all his failures and mistakes are a matter of public interest.

In July 1944, Sidis was found unconscious by his landlady in his rented Boston dorm room. At the age of 47, he died of a massive stroke.

Biography

Parents and education (1898-1909)

Teaching activity and further education (1915-1919)

After a group of Harvard students began to threaten Sidis with physical harm, Sidis's parents, in order to protect him, found a position for their son as an assistant professor of mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. William began work in December 1915, aged 17. He taught courses in Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry and trigonometry. (He himself wrote a textbook on Euclidean geometry in Greek). But less than a year later, disillusioned with his work and the poor attitude of students who were older than him, William returned to New England. In September 1916, Sidis entered Harvard Law School, but did not graduate, interrupting his studies in his final year in March 1919.

Politics and arrest (1919-1921)

In 1919, shortly after Sidis left law school, he was arrested for participating in a May Day demonstration in Boston and sentenced to 18 months in prison. The arrest of one of Harvard's youngest graduates was widely reported in the press and quickly made Sidis a local celebrity. During the trial, Sidis called himself a socialist and stated that he refused to be drafted into the First World War for ideological reasons. (He later developed his own quasi-liberal theory, based on individual rights and "American social integrity"). But Sidis' father managed to convince the district attorney not to send William to serve his sentence. Instead, his parents sent him to a sanitarium in New Hampshire for a year and took him with them to California the following year. They began to insist that he change, otherwise they threatened to send their son to an insane asylum.

Later years (1921-1944)

Publications and research topics

Fields of study on which Sidis's work remains include American history, cosmology, and psychology. Sidis was a collector of railway tickets and was immersed in the study of transport systems. Under the pseudonym "Frank Falupa", he wrote a treatise on rail tickets, in which he identified ways to increase the capacity of the transport network that are only now beginning to find acceptance. In 1930, he received a patent for a permanent perpetual calendar that took leap years into account.

Sidis knew about 40 languages ​​(according to other sources - 300) and translated fluently from one to another. Sidis also created an artificial language, which he named Vendergood in his second book, entitled "Book of Vendergood", which he wrote at the age of eight. The language is largely based on Latin and Greek, but has also been based on German, French and other Romance languages.

Sidis was socially passive. At a young age, he decided to give up sex and devote his life to intellectual development. His interests manifested themselves in rather exotic forms. He wrote a study on alternative US history. He spent his adult life working as a simple accountant, wearing traditional rural clothing, and quitting his job as soon as his genius was discovered. Trying to live unnoticed, he hid from journalists.