William James Sidis (April 1, 1898–July 17, 1944) was a highly gifted mathematician and a child prodigy in the United States of America in the early 20th century. He was arguably one of the greatest geniuses of all time (see below). He was famous at first for his precociousness, and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from both the public eye and mathematics. He avoided mathematics entirely in later life, producing works on other subjects under pseudonyms, and today is largely unknown.
Sidis was born to Jewish Russian immigrant parents, Boris Sidis and Sarah Sidis née Mandelbaum. Boris emigrated in 1887 to escape political prosecution for breaking the Czarist laws against teaching peasants to read, while Sarah's family fled the pogroms about 1889. Boris and Sarah were considered geniuses in their own right. Boris taught psychology at Harvard University, treated patients as a psychologist and psychiatrist, and wrote many books. Sarah was a medical doctor who had received no formal education before medical school, except for tutoring by Boris. She gave up her own medical career to assist in William's education. William was named for a friend and colleague of Boris, William James.
At age 11, he entered Harvard University as part of a program to enroll gifted students early (the university had previously refused to let him apply at age eight), and gave a lecture on four dimensional bodies to an auditorium of mathematicians which was well-received.
Sidis's parents believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, as opposed to disciplinary punishment, an unusual idea in the early 20th century, for which they received much criticism. However, consequently Sidis could read at 18 months (hyperlexia), taught himself Latin at 2, Greek at 3, had written a treatise on anatomy at 4, wrote four books and knew eight languages (English, Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, French, German and Vendergood, his own invention) by age 8.
Teaching and further education
In 1914, Sidis took up a position as a professor of mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. After less than a year, frustrated with the department, his teaching requirements, and his treatment by students much older than he, Sidis gave up his post and returned to Boston. Sidis then enrolled at the Harvard Law School in September of 1916 but withdrew in good standing in March of 1919 [1].
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Politics and arrest
In 1919, Sidis was arrested for participating in an anti-draft May Day parade (though initially a socialist, Sidis later favored libertarianism, another term he may have coined) and sentenced to 18 months in jail under the Sedition Act of 1918 for acting as a conscientious objector. His parents used their influence to keep him out of prison but held him in their summer home in California instead for a year [2].
After escaping back to the East Coast in 1921, Sidis was determined to live a private life and would only take work running calculating machines or other fairly menial tasks. He devoted himself to his hobby of collecting streetcar transfers, published periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history.
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Later life and remembrances
In 1944, Sidis won a small Supreme Court of the United States victory for his seven-year charges against The New Yorker for invasion of privacy; earlier courts had dismissed Sidis as a public figure with no right to challenge personal publicity.
Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1944.
Samuel Rosenberg published a Freudian analysis of Sidis's interest in streetcar transfers and his jokes about them in The Confessions of a Trivialist (also published as The Come as You Are Masquerade Party), including a comparison of Sidis with Harry Haller, the protagonist of Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse.
After this lecture, MIT professor Daniel Comstock was quoted as saying that Sidis would become the foremost mathematician of the 20th century. His IQ was estimated at between 250 and 300 by psychometrician Abraham Sterling. He was the youngest and most prominent of the remarkable group of prodigies who studied at Harvard in 1909, which included Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, Richard Buckminster Fuller and composer Roger Sessions.
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