William James Sidis, originally a Russian Jew, is known as the most intelligent person in the world, but Sidis’s story is much different from other highly intelligent people. So much so that because Sidis hated crowds, he thought that the perfect life was not living as a celebrity in front of society, but living in seclusion.
Although he wants to live in seclusion, escaping from the crowd and fame, he is someone who should be recognized as being smarter than famous scientists such as Nikola Tesla, Einstein and Hawking.
William James Sidis, the child of a psychiatrist father and a doctor mother, was born on April 1, 1898.
Sidis’ family bought him a lot of books and maps during his childhood in order to contribute to his development. Thanks to this, Sidis was able to read the New York Times magazine, the most popular magazine in the world, when he was only eighteen months old. He also completed primary school in just nine months.
William James Sidis learned a total of twenty-five languages throughout his life; He also invented his own language called Windergood.
Moreover, when he was only eight years old, Sidis spoke eight languages in total, including Hebrew, Latin, Greek, French, German, Ottoman Turkish and Russian, in addition to his native English.
After finishing primary school, Sidis applied to become a student at Harvard University. He passed the written exams successfully, but was not accepted to Harvard because he was emotionally inadequate. Despite this, Sidis did not give up and managed to get accepted to Harvard University at the age of 11.
The year he entered Harvard University, he gave lectures to professors at the school on four-dimensional objects, thanks to his mastery of advanced mathematics. MIT physics professor Daniel F. Comstock says the following about Sidis: “Karl Friedrich Gauss is the only example in history among all the geniuses that Sidis resembles. I predict that young Sidis will become a great astronomical mathematician. He will develop new theories and invent new ways of calculating astronomical events. I believe that he will be a great mathematician in the future, the leader of this science .”
Sidis began attending Harvard as a full-time student in 1910 and graduated as an honor student on June 18, 1914, when he was only sixteen years old. After graduation; “I want to live a perfect life. The only way to live a perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I’ve always hated crowds.” He expressed that he wanted to be away from attention.
Also Sidis; He published a book called Animate & Inanimate, in which he discussed dark matter, entropy and the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics. Thus, it attracted worldwide attention, even though it did not want to.
In 1919 he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for rioting and attacking a police officer during a May Day socialist march. But he actually did neither.
During the trial, Sidis stated that he was a conscientious objector to World War I soldiers, a socialist, and an atheist. All these events caused him to be vilified by the public.
“Even seeing a mathematical formula makes me physically sick,” he complained in an interview after the events. “All I want to do is build a picking machine, but they won’t let me do that.” He got into jobs such as accounting, but whenever he was recognized or his colleagues found out who he was, he immediately resigned.
In 1935, Sidis wrote an unpublished manuscript, The Tribes and the States, tracing the contributions of Native Americans to American democracy.
He died of a brain hemorrhage in Boston in 1944 at the age of 46. Sidis, whose dead body was found by his landlord, left this world quietly, as a civil servant and penniless, even though he was the smartest person in the world.
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