According to the Population Reference Bureau, the total number of people born since humanity's beginning is something on the order of 110 billion. Maybe there was someone else in that massive number who was even more advanced than Sidis. Perhaps somebody like Aristotle or Euclid, or Galileo, had the same kind of raw mental crunching power. No way really to know. This much seems certain. No other person has ever been reported that could match Sidis in brainpower. At least no one that I've been able to find in the historical record.
Sidis was born in 1898 in New York City. His I.Q. was estimated to be on the order of 250-300. The term genius is generally applied to I.Q. levels beyond 140. Albert Einstein was slow compared to Sidis, who became a student at Harvard at the age of eleven.
At age thirteen, Sidis was lecturing graduate students on cosmological principles. He was reknown for his work in theoretical mathematics. At age eighteen, he wrote a text on Euclidean Geometry, in classic Greek.
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| William James Sidis |
In spite of, or perhaps because of, his extraordinary intellectual gifts, Sidis was a social misfit. As an adult, he withdrew from public life. He worked in a succession of low level, civil service jobs, while writing books under pseudonyms on subjects as diverse as American Indian History, Anthropology, and Civil Engineering. His interest in public transportation was reflected in his obsessive passion for collecting public transit transfer slips.
William Sidis died at the age of 44, of a cerebral hemorrhage.
His story is fascinating, but ultimately sad. Despite his prodigious intellect, he did not achieve any lasting noteriety. Just the same, wouldn't it be fun to try on that kind of brainpower, even for a day...
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