Smartest Men

William James Sidis

 (April 1, 1898–July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical abilities and a claimed mastery of many languages. After his death, his sister made the unverifiable claim that his IQ was “the very highest that had ever been obtained,” but any records of any IQ testing that Sidis actually took have been lost to history.

He entered Harvard at age eleven and, as an adult, was claimed to be conversant in over forty languages and dialects. It was later acknowledged, however, that some of the claims made were exaggerations, with a researcher stating, “I have been researching the veracity of primary sources of various subjects for about twenty-eight years, and never before have I found a topicso satiated with lies, myths, half-truths, exaggerations, and other forms of misinformation, as is in the history behind William Sidis.”.

Sidis became famous first for his precocity and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from public life. Eventually, he avoided mathematics altogether, writing on other subjects under a number of pseudonyms

.

Biography

1.1 Parents and upbringing (1898–1909)

William was named after his godfather, Boris’ friend and colleague, the American philosopher William James. Boris 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 at18 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

1.2 Harvard University and college life (1909–1915)

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 University. In early 1910, Sidis’ 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 field in the future. Sidis began taking a full-time course load in 1910 and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree on June 18, 1914, at age 16.

Another child prodigy, cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, also attended Harvard at the time and knew Sidis.

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.

1.3 Teaching and further education (1915–1919)

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 text book 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.

Politics and arrest (1919–1921)

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 by Roxbury Municipal Court Judge Albert F. Hayden. Sidis' arrest was featured prominently in newspapers, as his early graduation from Harvard had garnered considerable local celebrity status. During the trial, Sidis said he had been a conscientious objector to the World War I draft, was a socialist, and did not believe in a god like the "big boss of the Christians", but rather in something that is in a way apart from a human being. He later developed his own 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; instead, his parents held him in their sanatorium in New Hampshire for a year. They took him to California, where he spent another year. At the sanatorium, his parents set about "reforming" him and threatened him with transfer to an insane asylum.

Later life (1921–1944)

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 legally cleared to return to Massachusetts, and he was concerned for years about his risk of arrest. He obsessively collected streetcar transfers, wrote self-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. In a private letter, Sidis wrote that this was "not so encouraging". In 1935, he wrote an unpublished manuscript, The Tribes and the States, which traces Native American contributions to American democracy.

Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1944 in Boston at age 46.

Writing and research

Sidis's writing covered a broad range osubjects. He wrote about cosmology, Native American history, and rail transportation, and invented a language called Vendergood. In The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operates in the reverse temporal direction of our local area. The Tribes and the States (c. 1935) purports to give a history of the settlement of the Americas from prehistoric times to 1828.

Sidis was a "p"peridromophile, "ridromophile,"", a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. He wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, that identified means of increasing public transport usage. In 1930, Sidis received a patent for a rotary perpetual calendar that took into account leap years

For this work, he was invited to speak at the inaugural "genius meeting" in 1926, hosted by Winifred Sackville Stoner's League for Fostering Genius in Tuckahoe, New York.

The Animate and the Inanimate

Sidis wrote The Animate and the Inanimate to elaborate his thoughts on the origin of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics through Maxwell's demon, among other things. It was published in 1925, but it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916. One motivation for the theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve energy" theory, which proposed that people subjected to extreme conditions could use "reserve energy". Sidis' own "forced prodigy" upbringing was a result of testing the theory. The work is one of the few that Sidis did not write under a pseudonym.

In The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis writes that the universe is infinite and contains sections of "negative tendencies" where the laws of physics are reversed, juxtaposed with "positive tendencies," which swap over epochs of time. He writes that there was no "origin of life": life has always existed and has only changed through evolution. Sidis adopted Eduard Pflüger's cyanogen-based life theory and cites "organic" things such as almonds that have cyanogen that does not kill. Because cyanogen is normally highly toxic, almonds are a strange anomaly. Sidis describes his theory as a fusion of the mechanistic model of life and the vitalist model, as well as entertaining the notion that life came to Earth from asteroids (as advanced by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz). Sidis also writes that functionally speaking, stars are "alive" and undergo an eternally repeating light-dark cycle, reversing the second law in the dark portion of the cycle.

Vendergood language

Sidis created a constructed language called Vendergood in his second book, the Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at age 7. While biographer Amy Wallace briefly described the language and manuscript, the whole work is not publicly available. The language was mostly based on Latin and Greek, but also drew on German and French and other Romance languages. It distinguished between eight moods: indicative, potential, imperative absolute, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, optative, and Sidis' own "strongeable". One of its chapters is titled "Imperfect and Future Indicative Active". Other parts explain the origin of Roman numerals. It uses base 12 instead of base 10:

• eis – 'one'

• duet – 'two'

• tre – 'three'

• guar – 'four'

• quin – 'five'

• sex – 'six'

• sep – 'seven'

• oo (oe?) – 'eight'

• non – 'nine'

• ecem – 'ten'

• elevenos – 'eleven'

• dec – 'twelve'

• eidec (eis, dec) – 'thirteen'

Most of the examples are presented in the form of tests:

1. 'The bowman obscures.' = The toxoteis obscurit.

2. 'I am learning Vendergood.' = (Euni) disceuo Vendergood.

3. 'What do you learn?' (sing.). = Quen diseois-nar?

4. 'I obscure ten farmers.' = Obscureuo ecem agrieolai.

Legacy

After his death, Sidis' sister Helena said that he had an IQ "the very highest that had ever been obtained", as reported in Abraham Sperling's 1946 book Psychology for the Millions. Sperling wrote:

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 a matter of record.

It has been acknowledged that Helena and William's mother Sarah had a reputation for exaggerated statements about her family. Helena may have falsely stated that the Civil Service exam William took in 1933 was an IQ test and that his ranking of 254 was an IQ score of 254. It is speculated that the number "254" was actually William's placement on the list after he passed the Civil Service exam, as he wrote in a letter to his family.

Sources

• Wallace, Amy (1986). The Prodigy: a Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy

External links

• Sidis Archives at Sidis.net

• Works by William James Sidis at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) 

Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Sidis

Boris Sidis: October 12, 1867 – October 24, 1923) was a Ukrainian-American psychopathologist, psychologist, physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher of education. Sidis founded the New York State Psychopathic Institute and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

Sidis applied his own psychological approaches to raising William in whom he wished to promote a high intellectual capacity. After receiving much publicity for his childhood feats, he came to live an eccentric life and died in relative obscurity. Sidis himself derided intelligence testing as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading