William James Sidis

His works were published under various pseudonyms, as he never used his real name as an author. His father, the psychologist Boris Sidis, raised his son according to certain principles with the desire for his son to be gifted. Sidis became famous first for his precocity and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from public life. Eventually, he avoided mathematics altogether, writing on other subjects under a number of pseudonyms. He entered Harvard University at age 11 and, as an adult, was claimed by family members to have an IQ between 250 and 300, and to be conversant in about 25 languages and dialects. These statements have not been verified, but many of his contemporaries, including Norbert Wiener and Daniel Frost Comstock, agreed that he was extremely intelligent. He retreated from public life after being arrested and tried for his presence at a socialist parade and died young from a brain hemorrhage.

William James Sidis studied at Harvard Law School and Harvard University. The recorded working language is English, Latin and French. The field of work recorded is mathematics and constructed language. Employment is recorded with Rice University. Works named in the authority record are The Tribes and the States and The Animate and the Inanimate.

• Name — William James Sidis • Born — 1 April 1898 • Birthplace — Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. • Died — 17 July 1944 • Place of death — Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. • Education — Harvard University (BA, 1914) • Employer — Rice Institute

Sidis was born to Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), on April 1, 1898, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Boris Sidis, had emigrated in 1887 to escape political and antisemitic persecution. His mother, Sarah (Mandelbaum) Sidis, and her family had fled the pogroms in the late 1880s. She attended Boston University and graduated from its School of Medicine in 1897. William was named after his godfather, Boris's friend and colleague, the American philosopher William James. Boris was a psychiatrist and published many books and articles, performing pioneering work in abnormal psychology. Boris was also a polyglot. Sidis' parents believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, although their methods of parenting were criticized in the media and retrospectively. Sidis could read the New York Times at 18 months. By age eight, he had reportedly taught himself eight languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) and invented another, which he called "Vendergood".

Although the university had previously refused to let his father enroll him at age 9 because he was still a child, in 1909, at age 11, Sidis set a record by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard University. In early 1910, Sidis' mastery of higher mathematics was such that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies, attracting nationwide attention. Notable child prodigy and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, who attended Harvard at the time and knew Sidis, wrote in his book Ex-Prodigy: "The talk would have done credit to a first or second-year graduate student of any age...talk represented the triumph of the unaided efforts of a very brilliant child." MIT physics professor Daniel F. Comstock was full of praises: "Karl Friedrich Gauss is the only example in history, of all prodigies, whom Sidis resembles. 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." Sidis began taking a full-time course load in 1910 and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, on June 18, 1914, at age 16, earning a mixture of A, B and C grades. Shortly after graduation, Sidis told reporters: "I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion". He granted an interview to a reporter from the Boston Herald. The paper reported Sidis' vows to remain celibate and never to marry, as he said women did not appeal to him. Later he developed a strong affection for Martha Foley, and enrolled at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

In 1919, shortly after his withdrawal from law school, Sidis was arrested for participating in a socialist May Day parade in Boston that turned violent. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 by Roxbury Municipal Court Judge Albert F. Hayden. Sidis' arrest was featured prominently in newspapers, as his early graduation from Harvard had garnered considerable local celebrity status. During the trial, Sidis said he had been a conscientious objector to the World War I draft, was a socialist, and did not believe in a god like the "big boss of the Christians", but rather in something that is in a way apart from a human being. He later developed his own libertarian philosophy based on individual rights and "the American social continuity". His father arranged with the district attorney to keep Sidis out of prison before his appeal came to trial; instead, his parents held him in their sanatorium in New Hampshire for a year. They took him to California, where he spent another year. At the sanatorium, his parents set about "reforming" him and threatened him with transfer to an insane asylum.

After returning to the East Coast in 1921, Sidis was determined to live an independent and private life. He only took work running adding machines or other fairly menial tasks. He worked in New York City and became estranged from his parents. It took years before he was legally cleared to return to Massachusetts, and he was concerned for years about his risk of arrest. He obsessively collected streetcar transfers, wrote self-published periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history. In 1933, Sidis passed a Civil Service exam in New York, but scored a low ranking of 254. In a private letter, Sidis wrote that this was "not so encouraging". In 1935, he wrote an unpublished manuscript, The Tribes and the States, which traces Native American contributions to American democracy. In 1937, in an article in The New Yorker titled "Where Are They Now?", James Thurber pseudonymously described Sidis' life as lonely, in a "hall bedroom in Boston's shabby South End". In response, Sidis sued, alleging it contained many false statements. Lower courts had dismissed Sidis as a public figure with no right to challenge personal publicity. He lost an appeal on the invasion of privacy lawsuit at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1940. Judge Charles Edward Clark expressed sympathy for Sidis, who claimed that the publication had exposed him to "public scorn, ridicule, and contempt" and caused him "grievous mental anguish [and] humiliation", but found that the court was not disposed to "afford to all the intimate details of private life an absolute immunity from the prying of the press". The libel portion of the lawsuit however was allowed to continue, and Sidis eventually settled with The New Yorker for $3,000. Sidis died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1944 in Boston at age 46.

Sidis's writing covered a broad range of subjects. He wrote about cosmology, Native American history, and rail transportation, and invented a language called Vendergood. In The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operates in the reverse temporal direction of our local area. The Tribes and the States (c. 1935) purports to give a history of the settlement of the Americas from prehistoric times to 1828. Sidis was a "peridromophile", a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. He wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers, Notes on the Collection of Transfers, that identified means of increasing public transport usage. In 1930, Sidis received a patent for a rotary perpetual calendar that took into account leap years. For this work, he was invited to speak at the inaugural "genius meeting" in 1926, hosted by Winifred Sackville Stoner's League for Fostering Genius in Tuckahoe, New York.

Sidis wrote The Animate and the Inanimate to elaborate his thoughts on the origin of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics through Maxwell's demon, among other things. It was published in 1925, but it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916. One motivation for the theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve energy" theory, which proposed that people subjected to extreme conditions could use "reserve energy". Sidis' own "forced prodigy" upbringing was a result of testing the theory. The work is one of the few that Sidis did not write under a pseudonym. In The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis writes that the universe is infinite and contains sections of "negative tendencies" where the laws of physics are reversed, juxtaposed with "positive tendencies", which swap over epochs of time. He writes that there was no "origin of life": life has always existed and has only changed through evolution. Sidis adopted Eduard Pflüger's cyanogen-based life theory, and cites "organic" things such as almonds that have cyanogen that does not kill. Because cyanogen is normally highly toxic, almonds are a strange anomaly. Sidis describes his theory as a fusion of the mechanistic model of life and the vitalist model, as well as entertaining the notion that life came to Earth from asteroids (as advanced by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz). Sidis also writes that functionally speaking, stars are "alive" and undergo an eternally repeating light-dark cycle, reversing the second law in the dark portion of the cycle. Sidis' theory was ignored upon release, only to be found in an attic in 1979. Upon this discovery, Buckminster Fuller (who was a classmate of Sidis) wrote in a letter to Gerard Piel:

The Tribes and the States was written around 1935 but never completed, and remained unpublished at the time of Sidis' death. It is Sidis' history of Native Americans, focusing on the Northeastern tribes and continuing to the mid-19th century. He wrote it under the pseudonym "John W. Shattuck". Much of the history was taken from wampum belts; Sidis explained, "The weaving of wampum belts is a sort of writing by means of belts of colored beads, in which the various designs of beads denoted different ideas according to a definitely accepted system, which could be read by anyone acquainted with wampum language, irrespective of what the spoken language is. Records and treaties are kept in this manner, and individuals could write letters to one another in this way." Much of the book is centered on Native Americans' influence on migrating Europeans and the formation of the United States. It describes the origin of the federations that were important to the Founding Fathers. Sidis suggests that "there were red men at one time in Europe as well as in America".

Sidis created a constructed language called Vendergood in his second book, the Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at age 7. While biographer Amy Wallace briefly described the language and manuscript, the whole work is not publicly available. The language was mostly based on Latin and Greek, but also drew on German and French and other Romance languages. It distinguished between eight moods: indicative, potential, imperative absolute, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, optative, and Sidis' own "strongeable". One of its chapters is titled "Imperfect and Future Indicative Active". Other parts explain the origin of Roman numerals. It uses base 12 instead of base 10: • mis – 'one' • mis – 'two' • mis – 'three' • mis – 'four' • mis – 'five' • mis – 'six' • mis – 'seven' • mis (oe?) – 'eight' • mis – 'nine' • mis – 'ten' • elevenos – 'eleven' • mis – 'twelve' • mis (eis, dec) – 'thirteen' Most of the examples are presented in the form of tests: • 'The bowman obscures.' = The toxoteis obscurit. • 'I am learning Vendergood.' = (Euni) disceuo Vendergood. • 'What do you learn?' (sing.). = Quen diseois-nar? • 'I obscure ten farmers.' = Obscureuo ecem agrieolai.

Sidis' upbringing emphasized intellectual pursuits at the expense of other qualities. In 1909, The New York Times derisively portrayed Sidis as "a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment". Criticism of his father's child-rearing methods occurred within a larger discourse about the best way to educate children. Most educators of the day believed that schools should expose children to common experiences to create good citizens. Most psychologists thought intelligence was hereditary, a position that precluded early childhood education at home. The difficulties Sidis encountered in dealing with the social structure of a collegiate setting may have shaped opinion against allowing such children to rapidly advance through higher education in his day. Research indicates that a challenging curriculum can relieve social and emotional difficulties gifted children commonly experience.