🇺🇸William James
Sidis

William James Sidis could read The New York Times at eighteen months old. By age two he was typing in English. By six he had taught himself Latin, Greek, Russian, French, German, and Hebrew. At eight he passed the Harvard Medical School anatomy exam. At nine he wrote four books, including a treatise on grammar and a work on mathematical logic. On January 6, 1910, at the age of eleven years and nine months, he delivered a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the Harvard Mathematical Club — professors and graduate students leaning forward in their seats to follow the reasoning of a boy whose feet did not yet reach the floor from his chair. He was the youngest person ever admitted to Harvard. The university had lowered its minimum entry age from sixteen to accommodate him. His IQ, estimated retrospectively by psychologists using the limited testing instruments of the era, is sometimes placed between 250 and 300 — numbers that exceed the scale on which most IQ tests are normed, and that should be understood as expressions of astonishment rather than precise measurement.

Born on April 1, 1898, in New York City, William James Sidis was the son of Boris Sidis, a Ukrainian-American psychologist who had himself escaped the Russian Empire and worked his way through Harvard, and Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, a physician. Boris Sidis was a serious scientist who held heterodox views on child development, believing that early and intensive stimulation could dramatically accelerate intellectual growth. He named his son after his mentor William James, the philosopher and psychologist, and began his educational programme from birth. The Sidis household was an experiment. Unlike the Mill experiment — which at least had some basis in conventional scholarly methods — the Sidis experiment was total, constant, and unrelenting. Every waking moment was educational material. There was no ordinary childhood.

The attention attracted by William's Harvard admission was extraordinary, and not entirely welcome. Newspaper reporters camped outside the family home. William was photographed, interviewed, and exhibited. He was, in the parlance of the era, a sensation. He found it unpleasant. He graduated from Harvard in 1914 at age sixteen — summa cum laude — and briefly attempted to pursue mathematics at the graduate level. A lecture he gave at Rice Institute on the fourth dimension was attended by newspaper reporters more interested in his age than his mathematics, and the resulting coverage — condescending and intrusive — humiliated him. He retreated.

What followed is the most discussed and most contested portion of his life. Sidis rejected intellectual achievement — or appeared to. He took a series of manual jobs: bookkeeper, calculator operator, adding machine operator. He moved frequently, changed his name multiple times, and cultivated anonymity with the intensity that others bring to self-promotion. He was arrested in 1919 for participating in a socialist political demonstration in Boston, and spent time in a reformatory before his parents arranged his release. He collected streetcar transfer tickets obsessively and wrote a privately printed book, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, under a pseudonym. He claimed to have developed a new cosmology, a new theory of matter, a new mathematical system for predicting the stock market — but left almost nothing in publishable form.

In 1937, The New Yorker published a profile of him under the title "April Fool" — a reference to his birth date — that described his adult life as a series of failures and eccentricities, portrayed him as a broken and diminished figure, and lingered on the gap between his childhood promise and his adult obscurity. Sidis sued for invasion of privacy and libel. He lost, but the case established important legal precedent about the privacy rights of public figures. The New Yorker's portrait, though not wrong about the facts, missed something essential: Sidis was not a failed genius. He was a man who had decided, at some point, that the world's demand for his performance was a form of exploitation he would not submit to. He chose obscurity deliberately, with the same ferocious intentionality he had once brought to mathematics.

He died of a cerebral haemorrhage on July 17, 1944, in his rooming house in Boston, aged forty-six. He had no wife, no children, no professional position. His landlady found him. After his death, his writings were examined more carefully, and some were found to be genuinely interesting: his cosmological work The Animate and the Inanimate (1925) contains a prescient discussion of what we would now call entropy and reversible thermodynamics, anticipating later developments in the field. He may have been less idle than he appeared. The full scope of what he thought and wrote in those lost decades will never be known.