The Tragedy of a Math Guy Who Spoke 25 Languages and Was Smart as Hell
William James Sidis just wanted to be left alone
We think three things in life can make us successful:
- money,
- beauty,
- and brains.
But what if they are a curse?
William Sidis was a child prodigy. Even as a boy, he was an extraordinary mathematician, a polyglot, and a gifted writer. Many accomplished people praised his intelligence such as mathematician Wiener, physicist Comstock, and philosopher James.
He supposedly spoke 25 languages and dialects and had an intelligence quotient between 250 and 300. In comparison, average people have an IQ between 80 and 120. Einstein had 160.
But Sidis neither achieved much nor had a fulfilling life. He was a sensation instead.
William Sidis was his parents’ project
Sidis was born in New York in 1898 to a family of Jewish immigrants from today’s Ukraine. Before his birth, his parents got away from political and anti-Semitic abuse in Russia (to which Ukraine belonged at the time) and started a new life in the USA.
His father, Boris, was a renowned psychiatrist specializing in psychopathology. His mother was a doctor. Since William’s parents were smart and successful, they had great expectations of the boy. But an ambitious family can be a blessing as much as a burden. The New York Times once mockingly described young Sidis as “a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment”.
That experiment was the project of Boris Sidis, a polyglot who completed four degrees at Harvard. To make the boy a star in the land of opportunities, he explored psychological theories on his son and pressured William into learning.
People, look what reinforcement can make of a child.
When William was only 18 months old, he already read the New York Times. At the age of eight, he taught himself Latin, Greek, Russian, Hebrew, German, French, Turkish, and Armenian — all from different language families.
It seemed there was no stop for a brilliant little boy.
He invented Vendergood
At the age of eight, William created his own language and wrote a book called The Book of Vendergood. The artificial speech consisted of Latin, Greek, German, and French elements. It had grammar rules, tenses, and even eight moods. This is how the numbers sounded in Vendergood:
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
In the book, Sidis offered a small bilingual dictionary for communication:
Do I love the young man? = Amevo (-)ne the neania?
It was evident that the little one was unbelievably bright. He had the potential to achieve so many things and his father had a plan.
Sidis spent his childhood at Harvard
Boris Sidis tried to get William to Harvard at the age of nine but they rejected the application. Dear Sir, sorry, your son should be twice as old, yours faithfully.
But who were they to say that to Boris Sidis? Only two years later, William set the record: In 1909 he became the youngest person to get into Harvard. By 1910, thanks to his knowledge of higher mathematics, professors let him lecture at the Harvard Mathematics Club. He was only 12 and mom and dad could be proud.
The MIT physics professor Daniel F. Comstock was delighted:
“I predict that young Sidis will be a great astronomical mathematician. He will evolve new theories and invent new ways of calculating astronomical phenomena. I believe he will be a great mathematician, the leader in that science in the future.”
Newspapers went crazy. A kid who didn’t even enter puberty was teaching at Harvard!
In 1914, Sidis earned a Bachelor’s degree cum laude at the age of 16. Reporters flocked around William again. What do you want to be? What are your plans with such brains? The outstanding boy had his whole life ahead of him. He could be anything he wanted!
But fame had obviously taken its toll. William told the reporters he wanted to live a perfect life. In other words, a quiet place away from people and never come back. Happiness lied in being unrecognizable. The boy hoped he was about to leave behind himself the massive burden on his shoulders — his father’s dream life.
But life isn’t easy when you’re brilliant.
He couldn’t find his place anywhere
Reporters were asking, and the graduate was responding. But his answers were strange.
In an interview for Boston Herald, Sidis said he was never going to get married. He wasn’t interested in women, absolutely not, and wanted to remain in celibacy. A young good-looking guy filled with testosterone didn’t want a partner?!
A few years later he fell in love with a young aspiring journalist Martha Foley but it was unrequited love and Sidis remained single.
Not knowing how to live without studying, William later enrolled at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. For a short time, he even served at the League of Nations but left soon because of his pacifist beliefs: Woodrow Wilson didn’t withdraw the troops from World War I.
At 17, William Sidis taught three classes at today’s Rice University, Texas. But how do you educate teenagers older than you? They bullied him and soon he was let go. Thank you very much, boy, but where’s your authority?
Then he enrolled at Harvard Law School and became a very good student. He studied and studied until he withdrew in his final year. You can try to get away from your demons but they will hunt you down.
As a kid, William enjoyed learning and then his father did his best to change that love. The more time passed, the more William blamed Boris for everything he had done to him. In the end, their relationship was so strained that the son refused to come to his father’s funeral in 1923. No one can damage you as those you trust the most.
To find his own happiness, William got a poorly paid job as a minister’s assistant. It didn’t help much though. People were still like Hey, brainiac, what’s the square root of 2? And so he left the job.
In 1924, journalists discovered wunderkind Sidis was working as a manual worker. Now the headlines didn’t glorify him. It was mockery time. From a child prodigy, Sidis had obviously left his brain behind and used his hands to work, oh, what a waste of resources.
This was far from true but they found that out too late. After Sidis’s death, they discovered that while he had been a blue-collar worker, he wrote many books under different pseudonyms.
But Sidis ran away from praise and expectations into low-paid jobs. After a while, things got even worse for the mathematician who didn’t accomplish anything important under his name.
The false arrest
In 1919 at the age of 21, William was arrested. He took part in a Socialist Mayday parade in Boston that ended up in violence. America gave you education and you paid it back with leftism, you ungrateful kid.
Sidis got 18 months in prison for his activism. Of course, the story ended up in newspapers: The famous wunderkind was a violent socialist!
Boston Herald started the report about Sidis’s court case in 1919:
“William James Sidis, who was graduated from Harvard at the age of 15, told Judge Albert F. Hayden in the Roxbury Municipal Court yesterday that he is a Socialist, a believer in the soviet form of government, that he believed in evolution, that he does not believe in a god, that his god is evolution, and that he believes in our form of government to the extent of the Declaration of Independence.”
A blasphemy. This heathen obviously wanted to ignite the Russian revolution in the land of the free. You can’t just destroy a system built on the accumulation of capital. Was he crazy or what?!
During the court proceedings, Sidis also discussed his book The Animate and the Inanimate. There he talked about the origin of life and elaborated on William James’s theory that each one of us has “reserve energy” that we can use under extreme conditions. The “Bolshevik” mathematician also stated that life has existed forever and stars are “alive” just repeating the cycle of light and dark.
Oh, no, man, don’t get even crazier. Stick to the love of god and banknotes.
People were astounded.
The end that Sidis didn’t deserve
Finally, his parents got him out of prison and “helped” their son out: They put him in their sanatorium in New Hampshire for a year and started “reforming” William. There’s no idea you can’t get out of a stubborn young head with a bit of brainwashing and threat. They warned him they’d send him to a mental institution if he didn’t listen.
The young man counted the days until he got out.
In 1921, the 23-year-old William finally came back to the East Coast to live his own life. He became estranged from his family and did menial work to make ends meet. For many years he was anxious about being arrested again — the trauma of the “wrong” idea.
Although he struggled financially, William Sidis still did the work that fulfilled him: He wrote periodicals and taught several friends his version of American history.
In 1944, the former wunderkind won a settlement from the New Yorker. In one of his articles, journalist James Thurber wrote pseudonymously about Sidis as a lonely guy living in a “hall bedroom in Boston’s shabby South End.” A punk with the highest education who’d never done anything for society.
The mathematician was enraged.
Judge Charles Edward Clark sympathized with the mathematician. He said this caused Sidis “grievous mental anguish [and] humiliation,” but couldn’t protect him “from the prying of the press.”
Once again, the guy who just wanted to do his own thing was a journalist's prey. How many blows can a man take and not be broken?
Soon after the proceedings, William James Sidis died at the age of 46. The cause of death was cerebral hemorrhage. Funnily enough, what killed William was the same condition that killed his father, the man in charge of ruining his life.
We admire outstanding people but we often drag them through the mud, too. William James Sidis, the man who could have changed the world, was the victim of his parents’ ambitions, media sensationalism, and political circumstances. All he wanted was to be left alone but he was too smart to live his life in peace.
Sources:
Meet William Sidis: A Man With An I.q Higher Than Albert Einstein And He Still Amounted To Nothing, Opera News
The Rise and Fall of William James Sidis: From the Smartest Man Alive to a Social Reject, Interesting Engineering
William James Sidis | The Impossible IQ Man, Engineerine
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