WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS: THE MOST INTELLIGENT MAN IN HISTORY? - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

William James Sidis (1898-1944) was a child prodigy who amazed many with his learning abilities. Considered the wisest in history, he was said to have an IQ of between 250 and 300.

The claim was made by his sister Helena Sidis, who was later denied by other authors because they said that Sidis' biographers had exaggerated this fact. Her parents believed in training based on affection and understanding, and they instructed the child from an early age and enhanced her skills, so at 18 months she already had the ability to read newspapers such as the New York Times.

William James Sidis in 1914. The Sidis Archives

The career of the child prodigy William James was surprising, because at 8 years of age he already knew several languages, as a result of his IQ and the fact that his father was also a polyglot and tried to stimulate these learning in his son.

James Sidis came to dominate, among others, languages ​​such as Latin, Greek, German, Turkish, French, Hebrew and Armenian. In addition, he wrote four books and was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

William James lived a very isolated life, he hardly related to other people; he dedicated his whole life to the study of mathematics and languages. He did not marry or have any children, as he had other priorities in life. He considered himself an atheist and created his own language, called Vendergood.

Family

William James was born in New York on April 1, 1898. He was the son of a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant couple. His father, Boris Sidis, a Bachelor of Medicine and Philosophy, was the one who applied some principles of psychology to him to achieve surprising results. He was a psychiatrist and wrote several scientific articles and books.

His mother, Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, went to Boston University and obtained her degree from Medical School in 1897. Both had fled their home countries for political reasons.

First words

The child William James, just six months old, spoke to his mother the first word, "door" and a month later he confessed that he liked doors and people. He also pointed to the moon and said he wanted one for himself.

When he was 3 years old, he taught himself to type on his home typewriter, an instrument that he later used to write a letter requesting more toys from Macy's. One of his abilities that surprised the most was the ability to memorize everything he read, what they called photographic memory.

Studies (1909-1919)

It was not easy to enroll the boy William James at Harvard College, as the same university initially refused to receive him due to his age. However, she broke all barriers and in 1909, at the age of 11, she managed to enter a program for gifted students. In this space he shared with children such as the mathematician Norbert Wiener and the composer Roger Sessions.

It was not long before his great abilities were seen, and in 1910 he was elected to give a lecture on four-dimensional bodies at the Harvard Mathematics Club.

Daniel Comstock, renowned professor of mathematics at MIT, said emphatically that James Sidis would be one of the best mathematicians in the world. James Sidis decided to enroll full-time in a course and quickly paid off with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1914, when he was 16 years old.

After finishing his studies, he declared in several interviews that he preferred to live in isolation. She also said that she was not particularly attracted to women and children, that she desired a celibate life.

Some time later he met a girl, Marta Foley, whom he took a very special affection. He then enrolled in the Harvard School of Arts and Sciences.

Rice University

The last months at Harvard weren't the best for William James. It is not known if it was out of envy, but the fact is that a group of students physically assaulted James, a matter for which his parents decided to transfer him from the educational center.

After studying various options, they decided that their son could enter Rice University, in Houston, Texas, as a math teaching assistant. This new stage of the young man began in December 1915, when he was 17 years old.

At Rice University he taught courses in Euclidean, non-Euclidean geometry and trigonometry. He also combined teaching work with the writing of several textbooks; one of them was a Euclidean geometry course in Greek.

It seems that things were not very good for the star student James Sidis, as he received bad treatment and did not agree with the teaching methods.

Some time later a friend asked him why he had retired and James Sidis said that he was not a good professor, that he did not understand how they had given him the place and that the university staff was the one who had asked him to resign, it had not been his decision.

He returned to New England and later enrolled in Harvard Law School in 1916, although he did not finish his studies and decided to retire in 1919.

In prison (1919-1921)

After retiring from law, things for James Sidis turned dark. His libertarian ideal clashed with a society immersed in social and political conflicts that had triggered wars.

James considered himself an atheist and socialist and also a conscientious objector during the First World War, which was in full swing. The young man, while on a march on May 1, 1919, International Labor Day, was arrested due to the violence that broke out between protesters and security forces. They took him to jail and there he remained 18 months under principles stipulated in the Sedition Act of 1918.

The young James Sidis was already known to many people, the media had reviewed his exploits at an early age at Harvard. William's father negotiated with the judge in order to keep the young man out of jail while his appeal went to trial.

However, the teenager was admitted by his parents to a sanatorium, threatening to reform it. Later they took him to California.

Later years (1921–1944)

The last years of his life were spent between New York and Boston, fleeing the media and trying to go undercover. In fact, The New Yorker ran an article called "Where are they now?" In which they mentioned him; James Sidis went into a rage and filed a lawsuit that had no effect.

He changed jobs constantly those last few years of life because he didn't want employers to identify him with that Harvard wunderkind. William James Sidis died on July 17, 1944, at the age of 46 due to a stroke.

Intelligence quotient

James Sidis spent much of his life studying various subjects. Besides that, according to several authors, when he died he knew how to speak forty languages. Many of these claims were refuted by arguing that Sidis' sister Helena used to exaggerate about the tests her brother had taken.

If we consider that the normal in terms of IQ is between 90-110 and James Sidis reached 250-300 we can perhaps observe the differences and conjecture possible errors of interpretation in the statements of his family, more if we take into account coefficients of men as lucid like Einstein (160-180) or Stephen Hawking (160).

Ways to educate

Debates about the best way to educate children were constant during William James's lifetime. Many newspapers criticized the way in which Boris Sidis raised his son, as they were convinced that children had to have common experiences to learn from life.

Also some psychologists said that intelligence was hereditary, so they did not agree with a childhood education at home, in a personalized way.

However, over the years several universities chose to have special programs for cases such as the child prodigy James Sidis, it was the case of the Davidson Institute for the Development of talent, which created an extensive guide on the subject in question.

Regardless of the criticism, William James was considered a child prodigy, with achievements that no one had ever achieved in history and for this he is recognized.

Plays

James Sidis wrote an extensive work on topics such as history, philosophy, astronomy, cosmology, and taxonomy. Works on vehicle transfers, a study on civil engineering and vehicles, and texts on philology and anthropology that were lost over time were also known.

In The Animate and the Inanimate, a book published in 1925, James Sidis argued that there was a region of space where the second law of thermodynamics acted in the opposite direction to how we know it in our area. He predicted their existence by assuring that, in any case, they were not dark matter or black holes either.

The tribes and states (1935) no longer appeared under his name; the publication was signed with a pseudonym, Jhon W. Shattuck. In the book he recounts 100,000 years of North American history, and argued that both in Europe and in the United States there were "red men."

William invented a term to describe people obsessed with transportation systems, "peridromophile." As a result of his obsessions, he published a treatise on tram transfers under the pseudonym Frank Folupa.

Other reference works are: Vendergood's book, Mid-year exam in astronomy 4 (1912), “A commentary on the occurrence of revolutions”, article published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1918) and Notes on the collection of transfers (1918).

References

1. Blitz, M. (2013). A Genius Among Us: The Sad Story of Wiliiam J. Sidis. Recovered from todayifoundout.com
2. Casanova, F. (nd). William James Sidis: Story of a Gifted. Recovered from hdnh.es
3. Green, D. (2015). This Day in Jewish History 1944: "Smartest Man in the World" Dies Very Young and Very Alone. Recovered from haaretz.com
4. NPR Staff (2011). Meet William James Sidis: The Smartest Guy Ever? Recovered from npr.org
5. Samaniego, O. (2017). William James Sidis, the smartest in history? Recovered from debate.com.mx
6. Sperling, A. (1946). A Story of Genius. In Psichology for the Millions, 332-339.
7. Teinteresa.es (2013). William James Sidis, the most intelligent man in history. Recovered from teinteresa.es