Marylin Vos Savant

William James Sidis (April 1, 1898 - July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic abilities. He first became famous for his precociousness, and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from the public eye. He avoided mathematics entirely in later life, writing on other subjects under a number of pseudonyms.

William James Sidis was born to Russian Jewish immigrants on April 1, 1898 in New York City. His father, Boris Sidis, Ph.D., M.D., had emigrated in 1887 to escape political persecution. His mother, Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, M.D., and her family had fled the pogroms about 1889. Sarah attended Boston University and graduated from its School of Medicine in 1897. William was named after his godfather, Boris's friend and colleague, the psychologist William James. Boris earned his degrees at Harvard University, and taught psychology there. He was a psychiatrist, and published numerous books and articles, performing pioneering work in abnormal psychology. Boris was a polyglot and his son William would become one too at a young age.

Instead of the more common disciplinary approach to education, Sidis's parents believed in nurturing a precocious and fearless love of knowledge, for which they were criticized. Nevertheless, the young Sidis could read the New York Times at 18 months, taught himself eight languages (Latin, Greek, French, Russian, German, Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian) by age eight, and invented another, which he called Vendergood. The New York Times described Sidis as "a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment".

Although the university had previously refused to let his father enroll him at age nine because he was still a child, Sidis set a record in 1909 by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard College. He was 11 years old, and entered Harvard as part of a program to enroll gifted students early. The experimental group included mathematician Norbert Wiener, Richard Buckminster Fuller, and composer Roger Sessions. In early 1910, his mastery of higher mathematics was such that he lectured the Harvard Mathematical Club on four-dimensional bodies, prompting MIT professor Daniel F. Comstock to predict that Sidis would become a great mathematician and a leader in that science in the future. Sidis began taking a full-time course load in 1910 and earned his