The story of the most intelligent man in the world

He is considered the most intelligent person in the world, someone with a prodigious mind and whose IQ was between 250 and 300 points. William James Sidis was a human calculator and a genius in linguistics, someone from whom amazing achievements were expected for being so intelligent, however there was an unfinished business that he never resolved and that took him away early: sadness.

Let’s imagine for a moment a child who at 18 months could already read the newspaper The New York Times . Let’s imagine now with eight of them speaking fluently French, German, Russian, Turkish and Armenian, mastering Latin and of course English, their mother tongue. Let’s go a little further and visualize this same little boy at 9 years old creating a new language called “sellgood” which linguists studied and described as very complete, correct and fascinating.

This child was William James Sidis, the son of two Russian-Jewish immigrants and born in New York on April 1, 1898.. Much has been said about him and much more has undoubtedly been written, and as always happens in these cases, reality is often made into fiction, data is exaggerated and the biography of a man is fictionalized with the pen of the romantic and the ink of the fantastic, when what we have is a quite crude story. And yet, tremendously interesting from a psychological point of view.

Physical and documentary evidence supports a large number of facts. One of them is as simple as it is transcendent: William J. Sidis never had a childhood, he was never able to enjoy the right to be a child, despite being so intelligent. At only 9 years old he was accepted into Harvard University. and on a cold night in January 1910, at the age of 12, he gave his first lecture on the fourth dimension in front of the scientific community and the press of the time.

His parents, a renowned Russian psychologist and one of the first female medical doctors of the time, were very clear about their goal: they wanted a genius. They educated their mind, completely forgetting the most essential things: their heart, their emotions.

William James Sidis

Genetics, disposition and a highly enabling environment

To know every detail of the life of what is considered “the most intelligent man in the world”, we have the book “The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America’s Greatest Child Prodigy”of Amy Wallace. In it We are quickly struck by the type of upbringing our protagonist received..

Both his father and mother had a brilliant mind, hence the genetic factor played its part in developing that high intelligence in him. However, this couple’s purpose when it comes to having a child is as clear as it is controversial: They wanted to train a child’s brain to be a genius .

A life of laboratory and public exhibition

A facilitating environment, highly stimulating and oriented towards a very specific goal, was undoubtedly added to genetics.. It is known that his father, Boris Sidis, used sophisticated techniques – including hypnosis – to enhance the abilities and potential of his son at an early age.

His mother, for her part, left medicine to, according to her, “model” the child and innovate new teaching strategies. It should be said that William himself, without a doubt, also showed a clear disposition towards learning. However, There was something that always marked and traumatized him: exposure to the public and the media.

Parents published academic reports every so often showing the child’s achievements. The press was watching him, as was the scientific community. It is known that while he studied at Harvard he suffered daily harassment from the press. After graduating cum laude and leaving academics amazed by his theories of the fourth dimension, they took him to the University of Houston to teach mathematics, while he in turn began a career in law.

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The smartest man in the world and his sad end

William would not finish law school or any other degree, despite being so intelligent. He was not yet 17 years old when he decided to react to that academic and experimental environment. where he felt like a laboratory mouse, observed with a magnifying glass and analyzed in every aspect and in every thought. In 1919 he was arrested and taken to prison for starting a demonstration and recruiting young people for a communist movement.

Given the influence of his parents and the relevance of his figure, he was quickly released. However, in his efforts to defend himself from his parents and from society itself, he relapsed again, causing youth uprisings against capitalism and appearing highly arrogant in front of the judges. Finally, He was imprisoned for two years, thus achieving what he wanted so much: solitude and isolation.

After regaining his freedom, the first thing William J. Sidis did was change his name. He wanted a nondescript life, but every so often he was found by his parents or the press, thus beginning a continuous pilgrimage through the United States where he would look for sporadic jobs and do what he liked most: writing. He made multiple publications under various pseudonyms. He wrote books on history and others on theories of black holes.. According to his biographers, there may be dozens of forgotten books where the figure of William J. Sidis is actually hidden under some false identity.

William J. Sidis

An end too early and alone

William J. Sidis loved only one woman: Martha Foley, a young Irish activist with whom he had a relationship as complex as it was unequal. This woman’s photo was the only thing they found in her clothes when her lifeless body was found in a small Boston apartment in 1944. He was 46 years old and died of a stroke.

His last years had been spent from court to court. The press enjoyed slandering him: “the child prodigy who amounted to nothing cries now while working as a warehouse boy”, “the most intelligent man in the world has a miserable life”, “the genius of mathematics and linguistics has burned out”, “William J. “Sidis is tired of thinking.”

We do not know if he really got tired of thinking and even of living. However, what can be deduced from reading his biographies is that He got tired of society and that family and academic environment that had placed very high expectations on him. before he was even born.

William James Sidis remains to this day the person with the highest IQ on record. He is followed by the young Terence Tao with an IQ of 225-230, a young Australian mathematician who currently teaches at the University of Los Angeles.

However, it is very likely that somewhere in the world there is one or several child prodigies, not yet identified, who even exceed these intelligence scores. The truth is that it doesn’t matter, because the numbers are just that, numbers.. The essential thing in these cases is that they are allowed to have a childhood, to be children, to enjoy safe emotional bonds where they can fulfill themselves personally in whatever they want, in freedom and without pressure.

Because as we have already seen with this story, sometimes high intelligence is not synonymous with happiness.

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