What Child Has The Highest Iq

American child prodigy (1898–1944)

William James Sidis
Sidis at his Harvard graduation (1914)
Born	(1898-04-01)Apr one, 1898 Manhattan, New York City, U.Southward.
Died	July 17, 1944(1944-07-17) (aged 46) Boston, Massachusetts, U.Due south.
Other names	John W. Shattuck Frank Folupa Parker Greene Jacob Marmor
Alma mater	Harvard University Rice Establish Harvard Law School
Notable piece of work	The Animate and the Inanimate (1925) The Tribes and united states of america (c.  1935)
Relatives	Anne Fadiman (cousin)

William James Sidis
(; April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He is notable for his 1920 book
The Animate and the Inanimate, in which he speculates most the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.

Sidis was raised in a particular manner past his male parent, psychiatrist Boris Sidis, who wished his son to be gifted. Sidis first became famous for his precocity and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from public life. Eventually, he avoided mathematics altogether, writing on other subjects nether a number of pseudonyms. He entered Harvard at age 11 and, as an adult, was said to have an extremely high IQ, and to be conversant in about 25 languages and dialects. Some of these statements have non been verified, but many of his contemporaries, including Norbert Wiener, Daniel Frost Comstock and William James, agreed that he was extremely intelligent.

Biography

[edit]

Parents and upbringing (1898–1908)

[edit]

Sidis was built-in to Jewish emigrants from Ukraine,^[one]
on April 1, 1898, in New York Urban center. His father, Boris Sidis, had emigrated in 1887 to escape political and anti-semitic persecution.<sup>[ii]

: 2–4</sup>

His mother, Sarah (Mandelbaum) Sidis, and her family had fled the pogroms in the late 1880s.<sup>[ii]

: 7</sup>

Sarah attended Boston University and graduated from its School of Medicine in 1897.^[iii]
William was named subsequently his godfather, Boris'southward friend and colleague, the American philosopher William James. Boris was a psychiatrist and published numerous books and articles, performing pioneering work in abnormal psychology. He was a polyglot, and his son William would also go i at a young age.

Sidis'due south parents believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, although their methods of parenting were criticized in the media and retrospectively.<sup>[iv]
[2]

: 281, Epilogue</sup>

Sidis could read The New York Times at xviii months.<sup>[2]

: 23</sup>

Past 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".

Harvard University and higher life (1909–1915)

[edit]

Although the University had previously refused to let his father enroll him at historic period 9 considering he was nevertheless a child, Sidis ready a record in 1909 past becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard Academy. In early 1910, Sidis'due south mastery of higher mathematics was such that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on iv-dimensional bodies, attracting nationwide attention.^[5]
[6]
Notable kid prodigy, cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, who too attended Harvard at the time and knew Sidis, after stated in his book
Ex-Prodigy: "The talk would have washed credit to a first or second-year graduate student of any historic period...talk represented the triumph of the unaided efforts of a very vivid child."^[vii]
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 exist a great astronomical mathematician. He volition evolve new theories and invent new ways of computing astronomical phenomena. I believe he will be a great mathematician, the leader in that scientific discipline in the future."^[2]
Sidis began taking a full-time course load in 1910 and earned his Available of Arts degree,
cum laude, on June 18, 1914, at age 16.^[8]

Shortly after graduation, he told reporters "I want to live the perfect life. The simply 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's vows to remain chaste and never to ally, as he said women did not appeal to him. Later he developed a strong affection for Martha Foley, one year older than him. He later enrolled at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Teaching and further education (1915–1919)

[edit]

Subsequently a group of Harvard students threatened Sidis physically, his parents secured him a chore at the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art (now Rice University) in Houston, Texas, equally a mathematics teaching assistant. He arrived at Rice in December 1915 at the age of 17. He was a graduate fellow working toward his doctorate.

Sidis taught 3 classes: Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, and freshman math (he wrote a textbook for the Euclidean geometry course in Greek).<sup>[2]

: 112</sup>

After less than a year, frustrated with the section, his teaching requirements, and his handling past students older than himself, Sidis left his mail and returned to New England. When a friend later asked him why he had left, he replied, "I never knew why they gave me the task in the first place—I'm non much of a instructor. I didn't go out: I was asked to get." Sidis abandoned his pursuit of a graduate caste in mathematics and enrolled at the Harvard Police Schoolhouse in September 1916, but withdrew in adept standing in his concluding year in March 1919.^[9]

Politics and abort (1919–1921)

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In 1919, shortly afterward his withdrawal from constabulary school, Sidis was arrested for participating in a socialist May Twenty-four hours parade in Boston that turned violent. He was sentenced to xviii months in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 past Roxbury Municipal Courtroom Judge Albert F Hayden. Sidis'south arrest featured prominently in newspapers, as his early graduation from Harvard had garnered considerable local celebrity status. During the trial, Sidis stated that he had been a conscientious objector to the World State of war I draft, was a socialist, and did not believe in a god like the "big boss of the Christians," just rather in something that is in a style apart from a human being being.^[x]
[11]
He later developed his own libertarian philosophy based on individual rights and "the American social continuity".^{[12]
[thirteen]}
His begetter arranged with the commune attorney to keep Sidis out of prison house before his appeal came to trial; his parents, instead, held him in their sanatorium in New Hampshire for a year. They took him to California, where he spent another year.^[14]
At the sanatorium, his parents prepare almost "reforming" him and threatened him with transfer to an insane asylum.^[14]

Later life (1921–1944)

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After returning to the East Coast in 1921, Sidis was determined to live an contained and private life. He only took work running calculation machines or other adequately menial tasks. He worked in New York City and became estranged from his parents. It took years before he was cleared legally to return to Massachusetts, and he was concerned for years well-nigh his risk of arrest. He obsessively collected streetcar transfers, wrote cocky-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 depression ranking of 254.^[15]
In a individual letter, Sidis wrote that this was "non so encouraging".^[15]
In 1935, he wrote an unpublished manuscript,
The Tribes and the states, which traces Native American contributions to American democracy.^[sixteen]

In 1944, Sidis won a settlement from
The New Yorker
for an article published in 1937.^[17]
He had alleged it contained many false statements.^[18]
Under the title "Where Are They Now?", James Thurber pseudonymously described Sidis'southward life equally lonely, in a "hall bedroom in Boston's shabby South End".^[19]
Lower courts had dismissed Sidis as a public figure with no right to challenge personal publicity. He lost an entreatment of an invasion of privacy lawsuit at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Excursion in 1940 over the same article. Judge Charles Edward Clark expressed sympathy for Sidis, who claimed that the publication had exposed him to "public scorn, ridicule, and antipathy" and acquired him "grievous mental anguish [and] humiliation," but found that the court was non disposed to "beget to all the intimate details of private life an absolute immunity from the prying of the printing".^[20]

Decease

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Sidis died from a cognitive hemorrhage in 1944 in Boston at age 46.^[21]

Publications and subjects of enquiry

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From writings on cosmology, to writings on Native American history, to
Notes on the Drove of Transfers,
and several purported lost texts on anthropology, philology, and transportation systems, Sidis covered a broad range of subjects. Some of his ideas concerned cosmological reversibility^[22]
and "social continuity".^[23]

In
The Animate and the Inanimate
(1925), Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second police force of thermodynamics operated in opposite to the temporal direction that we experience in our local area. Everything outside of what nosotros would today telephone call a galaxy would be such a region. Sidis said that the matter in this region would not generate light. Sidis'southward
The Tribes and u.s.
(c. 1935) employs the pseudonym "John W. Shattuck", purporting to give a 100,000-twelvemonth history of the Settlement of the Americas, from prehistoric times to 1828.^[24]
In this text, he suggests that "there were red men at one fourth dimension in Europe too equally in America".^[25]

Sidis was likewise a "peridromophile", a term he coined for people fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. He wrote a treatise on streetcar transfers nether the pseudonym of "Frank Folupa" that identified ways of increasing public transport usage.^[26]

In 1930, Sidis received a patent for a rotary perpetual agenda that took into account spring years.^[27]

The Breathing and the Inanimate


[edit]

Sidis wrote

The Animate and the Inanimate

to particular his thoughts on the origins of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics through Maxwell's Demon, amidst other things. Information technology was published in 1925;^[28]
notwithstanding, it has been suggested that Sidis was working on the theory as early as 1916.^[29]
One motivation for writing this theory appears to be to explain psychologist and philosopher William James's "reserve free energy" theory which said that there was "reserve energy" that could be used by people when put nether farthermost atmospheric condition, Sidis'south ain "forced prodigy" upbringing being a result of testing said theory. The piece of work is 1 of the few works that Sidis did not write under a pseudonym.

In
The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis states that the universe is space, as well equally it containing sections of "negative tendencies" where^[30]
various laws of physics were reversed that are juxtaposed with "positive tendencies", which switch over epochs of time. Sidis states that there was not an "origin of life", only that life has always existed and that it has but inverse through evolution. Sidis as well adopts Eduard Pflüger'due south cyanogen based life theory, and Sidis cites "organic" things such equally almonds (his case) that accept cyanogen that doesn't kill, as cyanogen (and derivatives thereof) is normally a highly toxic substance thus making this a strange bibelot. Sidis describes his theory equally a fusion of the mechanistic model of life and the vitalist model of life, likewise as entertaining the notion of life coming to earth from asteroids (as advanced by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz). Sidis also states that functionally speaking, stars are "live" and undergo an eternally repeating low-cal-night cycle, reversing the second law in the nighttime portion of the cycle.^[31]

Sidis's theory at the time of its release was ignored,^[17]
merely to be institute in an cranium in 1979. Upon this discovery, Buckminster Fuller (who was a classmate of William James Sidis) said the following about
The Animate and the Inanimate:^[32]

Imagine my excitement and joy on being handed this xerox of Sidis'southward 1925 volume, in which he clearly predicts the black hole. In fact, I notice his whole book,
The Breathing and the Inanimate
to be a fine cosmological piece. I observe him focusing on the aforementioned subjects that fascinate me, and coming to about the same conclusions as those I accept published in
SYNERGETICS, and will be publishing in
SYNERGETICS Book II, which has already gone to the press.

As a Harvard human of a generation later, I hope y'all will become every bit excited equally I am at this discovery that Sidis did go on after college to do the about magnificent thinking and writing."

—Buckminster Fuller

Vendergood language

[edit]

Sidis created a constructed language called
Vendergood
in his 2d volume, the
Book of Vendergood, which he wrote at the age of 8. The language was mostly based on Latin and Greek, simply also drew on German language and French and other Romance languages.^[two]
Information technology distinguished between eight moods: indicative, potential, imperative absolute, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, optative, and Sidis's own strongeable.<sup>[2]

: 41</sup>

1 of its capacity is titled "Imperfect and Future Indicative Active". Other parts explicate the origin of Roman numerals. It uses base 12 instead of base x:

• 
  eis
  
  – 'one'
• 
  duet
  
  – 'two'
• 
  tre
  
  – 'three'
• 
  guar
  
  – 'four'
• 
  quin
  
  – 'v'
• 
  sex activity
  
  – 'six'
• 
  sep
  
  – '7'
• 
  oo
  
  (
  oe?
  ) – 'eight'
• 
  non
  
  – 'nine'
• 
  ecem
  
  – '10'
• 
  elevenos
  
  – 'eleven'
• 
  dec
  
  – 'twelve'
• 
  eidec
  
  (
  eis, dec
  ) – 'thirteen'

Most of the examples are presented in the form of tests:

1. 'Practice I love the young human?' =
   
   Amevo (-)ne the neania?
   
2. 'The bowman obscures.' =
   
   The toxoteis obscurit.
   
3. 'I am learning Vendergood.' =
   
   (Euni) disceuo Vendergood.
   
4. 'What exercise you larn?' (sing.). =
   
   Quen diseois-nar?
   
5. 'I obscure ten farmers.' =
   
   Obscureuo ecem agrieolai.
   
   <sup>[ii]
   
   : 42–43</sup>
   

The Tribes and us


[edit]

The Tribes and u.s.

outlines the history of the Native Americans, focusing by and large on the Northeastern tribes and standing up to the mid-19th century. It was written effectually 1935 simply was never published for lack of completion at the time of Sidis's death. Sidis wrote the history nether 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 chaplet, in which the various designs of beads denoted different ideas according to a definitely accepted organization, which could exist 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 mode."^[33]

Much of the subject matter of the volume is centered on the influence of Native Americans on migrating Europeans and the issue of Native Americans on the formation of the United States. Information technology describes the origination of the federations that were to be an important upshot to the Founding Fathers.

Legacy

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Afterwards his death, Helena Sidis said that her brother had an IQ reported in Abraham Sperling's 1946 book
Psychology for the Millions
as "the very highest that had e'er been obtained",^[34]
simply later authors found that some of his biographers, such as Amy Wallace, exaggerated how loftier his IQ actually was.^[15]
Sperling really wrote:^[34]

Helena Sidis told me that a few years before his death, her brother Nib took an intelligence test with a psychologist. His score was the highest that had ever been obtained. In terms of IQ, the psychologist related that the figure would exist between 250 and 300. Tardily in life William Sidis took general intelligence tests for Civil Service positions in New York and Boston. His phenomenal ratings are matter of record.

It has been acknowledged that Helena and William's female parent Sarah had developed a reputation of exaggerated statements about the Sidis family.^[15]
Helena had too falsely stated that the Civil Service test William took in 1933 was an IQ examination and that his ranking of 254 was instead an IQ score of 254.^[fifteen]
It is speculated that the number "254" was actually William's placement on the list after he passed the Civil Service exam, as he stated in a letter of the alphabet sent to his family.^[35]
Helena likewise said that "Billy knew all the languages in the earth, while my father only knew 27. I wonder if in that location were whatsoever Baton didn't know."^[15]
This argument was not backed past any other source outside the Sidis family, and Sarah Sidis as well made an improbable statement in her 1950 book
The Sidis Story
that William could learn a linguistic communication in just one twenty-four hour period.^[xv]
Boris Sidis had one time dismissed tests of intelligence as "airheaded, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading".^[36]
Regardless of the exaggerations, Sidis was judged by contemporaries such as MIT Physics professor Daniel Frost Comstock and American mathematician Norbert Wiener (who wrote about Sidis in his autobiography) to have had real ability.<sup>[37]
[2]

: 54

[38]</sup>

Sidis's life and work, peculiarly his ideas about Native Americans, are extensively discussed in Robert M. Pirsig's volume
Lila: An Research into Morals
(1991).^[39]
Sidis is also discussed in
Ex-Prodigy, an autobiography by mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who was a prodigy himself.^[40]

The Danish writer Morten Brask [da]
wrote a novel every bit a fictional account based on Sidis's life;
The Perfect Life of William Sidis
was published in Denmark in 2011. Another novel based on his biography was published past the German language author Klaus Caesar Zehrer [de]
in 2017.^[41]

In pedagogy discussions

[edit]

The fence nearly Sidis'south manner of upbringing occurred within a larger discourse about the best way to educate children. Newspapers criticized Boris Sidis's child-rearing methods. Nigh 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 babyhood pedagogy at habitation.^[42]

The difficulties Sidis encountered in dealing with the social structure of a collegiate setting may have shaped opinion against allowing such children to chop-chop accelerate through higher teaching in his day. Enquiry indicates that a challenging curriculum can relieve social and emotional difficulties unremarkably experienced by gifted children.^[43]
Embracing these findings, several colleges at present accept procedures for early on archway. The Davidson Institute for Talent Development has developed a guidebook on the topic.^[44]

Sidis was portrayed derisively in the printing of the 24-hour interval.
The New York Times, for example, described him as "a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment".^[4]
His mother later on maintained that newspaper accounts of her son diameter niggling resemblance to him.

Bibliography

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• The Animate and the Inanimate
  (1925)
• The Tribes and the states
  (c.
   1935) (PDF file)

References

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Sources

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• Wallace, Amy (1986).
  
  The Prodigy: a Biography of William James Sidis, America'south Greatest Child Prodigy
  . New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. ISBN0-525-24404-2.
  

External links

[edit]

• Sidis Archives at Sidis.net
• Article about William James Sidis at "The Directly Dope"