This is an accepted version of this page William James Sidis (/ˈsaɪdɪs/; April 1, 1898 – July 17, 1944) was an American child prodigy with mathematical and linguistic skills.

He entered Harvard University at age 11 and, as an adult, was claimed by family members to have an IQ between 250 and 300, and to be conversant in about 25 languages and dialects.

These statements have not been verified, but many of his contemporaries, including Norbert Wiener and Daniel Frost Comstock, agreed that he was extremely intelligent.

[8] By 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".

[9][10] Notable child prodigy and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, who attended Harvard at the time and knew Sidis, wrote in his book Ex-Prodigy: "The talk would have done credit to a first or second-year graduate student of any age...talk represented the triumph of the unaided efforts of a very brilliant child.

"[11][12] 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.

[17] After less than a year, frustrated with the department, his teaching requirements, and his treatment by students older than himself, he left his position and returned to New England.

Sidis abandoned his pursuit of a graduate degree in mathematics and enrolled at Harvard Law School in September 1916, but withdrew in good standing in his final year in March 1919.

[18] In 1919, shortly after his withdrawal from law school, Sidis was arrested for participating in a socialist May Day parade in Boston that turned violent.

Sidis' arrest was featured prominently in newspapers, as his early graduation from Harvard had garnered considerable local celebrity status.

During the trial, Sidis said he had been a conscientious objector to the World War I draft, was a socialist, and did not believe in a god like the "big boss of the Christians", but rather in something that is in a way apart from a human being.

[21][22] His father arranged with the district attorney to keep Sidis out of prison before his appeal came to trial; instead, his parents held him in their sanatorium in New Hampshire for a year.

He obsessively collected streetcar transfers, wrote self-published periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history.

", James Thurber pseudonymously described Sidis' life as lonely, in a "hall bedroom in Boston's shabby South End".

Judge Charles Edward Clark expressed sympathy for Sidis, who claimed that the publication had exposed him to "public scorn, ridicule, and contempt" and caused him "grievous mental anguish [and] humiliation", but found that the court was not disposed to "afford to all the intimate details of private life an absolute immunity from the prying of the press".

In The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), Sidis predicted the existence of regions of space where the second law of thermodynamics operates in the reverse temporal direction of our local area.

[34] Sidis wrote The Animate and the Inanimate to elaborate his thoughts on the origin of life, cosmology, and the potential reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics through Maxwell's demon, among other things.

Sidis adopted Eduard Pflüger's cyanogen-based life theory, and cites "organic" things such as almonds that have cyanogen that does not kill.

[44] Sperling wrote: Helena Sidis told me that a few years before his death, her brother Bill took an intelligence test with a psychologist.

Late in life William Sidis took general intelligence tests for Civil Service positions in New York and Boston.

[24] It is speculated that the number "254" was actually William's placement on the list after he passed the Civil Service exam, as he wrote in a letter to his family.

[24] Sidis' life and work, particularly his ideas about Native Americans, are extensively discussed in Robert M. Pirsig's book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991).

In 1909, The New York Times derisively portrayed Sidis as "a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment".

[49] The difficulties Sidis encountered in dealing with the social structure of a collegiate setting may have shaped opinion against allowing such children to rapidly advance through higher education in his day.

Research indicates that a challenging curriculum can relieve social and emotional difficulties gifted children commonly experience.