Statistically
speaking, most lives begin at birth, so it seems like this would be a
reasonable place to begin with Sidis's story.
Boris
Sidis was a rather prominent psychologist of the late 1800s and early
1900s who believed intelligence could be forcibly shoved into
someone. However, Boris was not an especially large man, so instead
of strong-arming genius into other adults, he chose those he could
easily overpower: his own children.
While
many parents encourage general learning as well as play, Boris Sidis
wanted nothing to do with the latter. Instead, he strung alphabet
blocks together to form large words and hung them over William's crib
in an effort to help him learn vocabulary. Boris spoke to William as
he would another adult, which increased William's understanding of a
variety of topics, all while savagely destroying his youth.
This
laborious training paid off: William could read the New York Times
at the unbelievable age of 18 months. Average children of this age
struggle with simple things like properly expelling waste in a
toilet, yet William was comprehending the nation's most intellectual
newspaper.
But reading is a task anyone can do, so William “Better Than You” Sidis had to top this. By the age of eight, he had taught himself eight languages. This is a pretty impressive number when you consider most of us prove our incompetence with one language by sending texts and emails using atrocious neologisms like “selfie,” “jk,” and “lol.” Eight also happens to be the number of languages Nicholas Tesla knew upon his death, by the way. Though reports regarding this matter are somewhat spotty, the prevailing number for Sidis's total of learned languages is around twenty-seven.
Oh,
yeah, and he created a language all of his own when he was a kid:
Vendergood. Why? Because he freaking could, that's why. All the
real nerds do it, just ask J.R.R. Tolkien. And he topped Tolkien's
Elfish, and every language in existence for that matter, by creating
a brand-spanking-new verb tense: strongeable. (No one has any idea
what it was used for, because Sidis's book on Vendergood was never
published, which sucks.)
This
isn't even the tip of the iceberg though. . .
Remember
struggling in Algebra? All those “x's” and “y's” and
polynomial pieces of crap? You're probably breaking out in a nervous
sweat right now, just from the bitter memories. Well, William “Brain
King” Sidis could solve those things and more in his head
before his age had reached the double digits. In fact, he graduated
high school at age nine.
Then he applied to Harvard.
He
was rejected at first, not because he wasn't qualified, but because
he was too young. William only had to wait two years to enroll. He
set the record as their youngest student ever, at 11 years of age.
(That's the age most kids go to middle school and stress over acne
and their first formal dances.)
So
what do you do when you've graduated from the nation's greatest
college at age 16? Party all night, sleep all day, right? Not for a
nerd! A major point Inman used in his wonderful piece about Tesla
that determined his geekiness was the fact that he lived celibate for
86 years (i.e. his entire life). However, it wasn't directly
mentioned that it was by choice that this happened. I'm gonna set
you straight right now that William “Blueballs” Sidis CHOSE not
to have sex.
“Girls
are icky...”
-William James Sidis
Part
of this might have been due to the fact that he was a social reject,
a minor side effect of having an IQ 50-100 points greater than
Einstein's.
That's right: William “300” Sidis had an intelligence quotient that would make Einstein or Hawking blush. Heck, Marilyn vos Savant can go cry herself to sleep, because she has been OVERTAKEN in the role of the World's Smartest Person. (Another difference between Sidis and vos Savant is that HE actually DID stuff.)
That's right: William “300” Sidis had an intelligence quotient that would make Einstein or Hawking blush. Heck, Marilyn vos Savant can go cry herself to sleep, because she has been OVERTAKEN in the role of the World's Smartest Person. (Another difference between Sidis and vos Savant is that HE actually DID stuff.)
Speaking
of doing stuff. . . Sidis didn't only help himself
through education. He was a highly prolific writer, and at this
point, we as a nation don't have any clue how much he wrote for a
rather simple reason: he had eight pseudonyms that we know
of.
Still,
more than 40 books, 80 scientific articles and various novels were
identified as having been published by this man.
You
might expect that being a supergenius equates to super-social. In
some cases, it could, but for Sidis, that is pretty much the opposite
of what happened. He was teased in school, and even with all his
writing, all his advancements for all of math, he was an outcast.
William “I'm Still Smarter Than You” Sidis finally decided that
people suck and that his perfect life would be one in isolation.
businessinsider.com
Donald
Trump is enough reason to come to that conclusion.
Eventually,
William “I Might Be Insane” Sidis decided to carry out this
aspiration. His father had come under fire for his harsh teaching
practices and William had been followed by the press since he was a
child. Even before photo-popping paparazzi existed, William was
tired of being followed by hungry journalists on their slow news days
and appropriately moved into a small apartment as a recluse.
Years
later, a female reporter had the nerve to trick him: she went out of
her way to befriend Sidis, who unwittingly provided her with ample
information for a decent story. Though she knew the real Sidis, she
chose to denigrate him, which Sidis was not pleased about.
William
“Leave Me Alone” Sidis's final public emergence had one goal: to
sue the reporter and her newspaper, The New Yorker.
He won, then fled from watching eyes forever. (He used this time to
rewrite Wall Street's statistical charts and collect streetcar exchanges, and as pathetic as that probably sounds,
it's true.)
Then he decided it was time to die.
It
was in 1944, at the unfortunately young age of 46 that the inside of
his head exploded. To medical practitioners, this phenomenon is more
commonly known as a cerebral hemorrhage, but it seems to me that
Sidis' knowledge manifested itself into something tangible. This
tangible object would obviously be pretty massive, considering his
middle name is literally
“Knows Everything,” so as soon as his schema solidified, an
artery would explode from the sudden increase in pressure and kill
him pretty swiftly.
Even
after death, that wasn't the end of William “James” Sidis's
incredible story. (His middle name is “James,” guys. I promise.)
You know how The Oatmeal makes a big deal about how revolutionary
Tesla was? I'm not saying he wasn't (cuz he totally was), but I
think Sidis thought on a larger scale than Tesla.
In his book, The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis enumerates on an area in space (something Tesla didn't really venture to describe beyond our own planet's atmosphere), wherein the Second Law of Thermodynamics is reversed, and light cannot be produced in such areas. This is described in modern science as a place unlike our own galaxy, and is similar to dark matter and black holes, but is somewhat different, due primarily to the terminology. Sidis predicted this type of thing, is the point.
Oh, and he wrote a few books
about the history of America, one an extensive look at America as we
know it today, and one regarding its settlement, spanning over 100
millenia. And that's pretty darn cool.
William Sidis, age 16
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