William James Sidis

William James Sidis (April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic abilities. He initially became famous for his precociousness, and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from the public eye. He avoided mathematics entirely in later life, writing on various other subjects under a number of different pseudonyms.

William James Sidis

Biography

Parents and upbringing (1898-1909)

William James Sidis was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Boris Sidis, Ph.D., M.D. and Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, M.D. on April 1, 1898 in New York City. Boris emigrated in 1887 to escape political persecution, while Sarah's family fled the pogroms about 1889. Boris entered Harvard University where he later earned his Ph.D. and M.D. He then taught psychology at Harvard, worked as a psychiatrist, published numerous books and articles, and performed pioneering work in psychopathology. Boris was a polyglot and his son William would become one too at a young age. Sarah attended Boston University and graduated from its School of Medicine in 1897.[1] However, she gave up her own medical career to assist in William's education. William was named after his godfather, Boris's friend and colleague, William James.

Instead of the disciplinary punishment so common to education, Sidis's parents believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, an unusual idea in the early 20th century, for which they received much criticism. Nevertheless, young Sidis could read the New York Times at 18 months, taught himself eight languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) by age eight and invented another, Vendergood.

Harvard and college life (1909-1915)

Although the university had previously refused to let him take the entrance examinations at age eight, in 1909, Sidis set a record by becoming the youngest person ever to enroll at Harvard College at age 11, as part of a program to enroll gifted students early. The experimental group included Norbert Wiener (the father of cybernetics), Richard Buckminster Fuller, and composer Roger Sessions. In early 1910 at age 11, he mastered higher mathematics to the point that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies, prompting MIT professor Daniel F. Comstock to predict that Sidis would become a great mathematician and a leader in that science in the future.[2] Sidis began taking a full-time course load in 1910 and earned his A.B., cum laude on June 18, 1914, at age 16.[3]

Shortly after graduation, he told reporters that he wanted to live the perfect life, which to him meant living it in seclusion. He granted an interview to a reporter from the Boston Herald, which published his vows to remain celibate and to never marry, and a statement that women do not appeal to him (although he later developed a strong affection for a young woman named Martha Foley[4]). He later enrolled at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Teaching and further education (1915-1919)

After a gang of Harvard students threatened to beat him up, his parents secured a job for him at Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas as a teaching assistant of mathematics. He arrived at Rice in December 1915 at age 17. He was a Graduate Fellow working towards his doctorate.

Sidis taught three classes, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, and trigonometry (he wrote a textbook 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 himself, 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." (Ref. 1) Sidis then abandoned his pursuit of a graduate degree in mathematics and enrolled at the Harvard Law School in September of 1916 but withdrew in good standing in March of 1919 in his final year.[5]

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 into a mêlée and was sentenced to 18 months in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 for rioting and assault. Sidis's arrest featured prominently in newspapers, as his early graduation from Harvard had garnered considerable local celebrity; during the trial, Sidis stated that he had been a conscientious objector of the World War I draft, did not believe in a god, and that he was a socialist (though he later favored a quasi-libertarian system that he invented).[6] His father made an arrangement with the district attorney to keep him out of prison before his appeal came to trial; his parents, instead, held him in their sanitarium in New Hampshire for a year, then took him to California where he spent another year.[7] While at the sanitarium, his parents set about "reforming" him and threatened him with transfer to an insane asylum.[8][9]

After escaping back to the East Coast in 1921, Sidis was determined to live an independent and private life and would only take work running adding machines or other fairly menial tasks. It took a number of years before he was cleared to be in Massachusetts again and he remained concerned of possible arrest for years.[10] He devoted himself to his hobby of collecting streetcar transfers, published periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history.

Later life and remembrances (1921-1944)

In 1944, Sidis won a settlement from The New Yorker for publishing an article about him in 1937, which he alleged contained many false statements.[11] He lost an appeal of an invasion of privacy lawsuit at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940 over the same article; lower courts had dismissed Sidis as a public figure with no right to challenge personal publicity.

Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 17, 1944, at age 46 in Boston, Massachusetts[12]; his father had died from the same malady in 1923 at age 56.

Abraham Sperling, Ph.D., director of New York City's Aptitude Testing Institute, said after Sidis' death that according to his computations, he "easily had an IQ between 250 and 300" * and that there was no evidence that his intellect had declined in adulthood.[13][14] (His father once dismissed tests of intelligence as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading." [15])

* Probably referring to ratio IQ.[16]

Publications and subjects of research

Aside from mathematics, subjects on which Sidis wrote or lectured included cosmology, psychology, and Native American history. Some of his ideas concerned cosmological reversibility, social continuity and libertarian rights.

In The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), Sidis predicted the existence of dark matter (not black holes as is often mistaken). This work on cosmology, based on his theory of reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics was the only book published under his name.[17]

Sidis' The Tribes and the States (ca. 1935) employs the pseudonym "John W. Shattuck," giving a 100,000-year history of North America's inhabitants, from prehistoric times to 1828.[18] In this text, he suggests that "there were red men at one time in Europe as well as in America."

Sidis was also a "peridromophile," a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. He wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers under the pseudonym of "Frank Folupa" that identified means of increasing public transport usage only now gaining general acceptance.[19]

In 1930, Sidis was awarded a patent for a rotary perpetual calendar that took into account leap years.[20] Also, in his adult years, he was estimated as capable of speaking more than forty languages.

Use as an example in educational discussions

The difficulties Sidis and other exceptionally young students encountered in dealing with the social structures of a university setting at a very young age helped to shape opinion against allowing precocious children to advance too rapidly through higher education. The debate over gifted education continues today, and Sidis remains a topic of discussion. Cast in modern standards, scholars usually classify Sidis as a profoundly gifted individual, and some critics use Sidis as the most vivid example of how gifted youth often do not achieve corresponding success as adults - in either material or creative terms.

Many of these depictions rely on Sidis' negative image in the press of the day, which refused to acknowledge that Sidis' intellect could be attributed to anything but monotonous cramming — precisely what his parents argued against. In fact, his mother later noted that newspaper accounts of her son had little or nothing in common with William himself.

See also

• Child prodigy
• Intelligence quotient

References

1. Wallace, Amy, The Prodigy: A biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. 1986. ISBN 0-525-24404-2

• A review of "The Prodigy" by Martha Brassil
• Book review by Robert N. Seitz, Ph.D.

External links

• "Sidis Archives" website
  • Frequently Asked Questions
• Details and outline of his life
• The Rise and Fall of William J. Sidis - a brief biography
• The Newsletter of the Rice (University) Historical Society
• "Apologia Pro Sua Vita", 1924 article from Harvard newspaper
• Family Biographies by Sarah Sidis