It’s hard to say for sure if there’s been one singular smartest person ever. How do we even measure- do we use raw IQ test results, brainy contributions to society, or a holistic ‘oh shit look at all the smart stuff this asshole can do’ measurement? Any of these might be fair, mainly because there’s no real right answer. There are a handful of people with purported IQs into the low-mid 200s, and though there’s been a wide variety in their fields of study, most of them didn’t peak in high school.
Then there’s William Sidis.
Today’s Moment of Science… The real Will Hunting(s), maybe. Part 2.
Born in 1898 to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, little Billy was never going to be an intellectual slouch. His father Boris Sidis was a psychiatrist with four degrees from Harvard. His mother Sarah was reportedly illiterate when she arrived in the US as a 17 year old. After Boris taught her to read and write, she went on to become one of the first female doctors in the country, decades before even getting the right to vote.
These were not your average parents. They wouldn’t be content just to let their super smart DNA slosh on down to any old offspring, no. They were going to cram as much knowledge into their firstborn as he could take.
Look, um. I’ve seen the ‘experiment on the baby’s brain’ part of some horror movies, and it never ends well.
It at least seemed to be off to a good start. Little William was advancing fast under his father’s philosophy that “a baby is never too young to start learning anything.” He was feeding himself with a spoon at just eight months and reading the New York Times before he reached his second birthday. He could speak eight languages by the age of six, and he reportedly could chitchat in 25 languages as an adult (as with so many things from a century ago, this one’s difficult to verify). As a child he even created one language he called ‘vendergood,’ along with drafting a constitution for a utopian society.
Sidis was admitted to Harvard at nine, but they were like “hey he’s nine so maybe put some training wheels on your mathematician?” He instead entered at age eleven, when he was obviously old enough to handle the pressures of adult life.
Hold onto your tuchus here, but Harvard wasn’t a fun place for young William to go through puberty.
He gave lectures as a pre-teen undergrad that would have been impressive for an adult graduate student. Which endeared him to some people, none of whom were his classmates. When he admitted he’d never kissed a girl to classmates, the teasing was cruel and humiliating. His parents moved him into an off-campus apartment to escape the bullying.
When he graduated, he said his goal was to lead a perfect life. Though our expectations for a polyglot supergenius’s ‘perfect life’ might include a Nobel Prize and discovering cures to some diseases, for William? It meant a life of seclusion. People had not been kind, and he was happy to be rid of them.
So he tried grad school for math and left because teaching college students when you’re 17 sounds like a bummer. Then he went to law school and left in his final year because reasons.
Then in 1919, he got arrested for marching in a socialist demonstration and allegedly assaulting a police officer. In his trial under direct questioning, he admitted to being a socialist and believing in the soviet form of government. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail, but was released conditionally to treatment at his father’s sanatorium and to work at MIT. To be fair, I’m not sure if his sentence was for the assault or the thought crime of being a socialist in America.
Whatever treatment he got from his father during his incarceration led them to estrangement. That’s unfortunately most of the William Sidis story. Because after that, he tried to get that life of seclusion. Every once in a while his prodigious past would catch up with him when someone recognized him and he’d have to pack up and move with his fake name to a new place, but he lived a quiet life. He worked as a bookkeeper, a translator, sometimes a janitor. He wrote several books under pseudonyms, and it’s possible they haven’t all been identified yet.
As for any resemblance to one Mr. Hunting, well. They’re both named Will, both from Boston, and both prodigies who amounted to, roughly, bupkis. They both had the dumbass temerity to defend themselves at trial. While their poor judgement landed them in trouble, people who gave a fuck about them on account of their giant brains helped get them a second chance contingent on therapy and working at MIT, which seems oddly goddamn specific for a coincidence.
William Sidis died in 1944. He was just 46 years old.
This has been your Moment of Science, off to go do some fun shit lest I turn into a burnout prodigy.
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