“The smartest person in history”: how was the life of a child prodigy who mastered the entire school curriculum in six months (5 photos)

And then he became the youngest student at Harvard.





William Sidis was born in New York in 1898. His parents emigrated to the USA. The boy's father, Boris Sidis, became a fairly famous scientist and taught psychology at Harvard. William's mother quit her job to raise her son.

Boris was literally obsessed with the idea of ​​raising his son to be a genius. And he loved to repeat:

A child is never too young to study.

So William became a guinea pig from infancy. The father showed the boy blocks with letters, pictures with abstract figures and used hypnosis. In theory, the fragile brain could not digest such information. But it worked.



By the age of 6, William knew seven languages ​​and mastered the entire school course in six months. Then he studied according to an individual program drawn up by his father, and at 11 he entered Harvard. It is believed that his IQ was 250-300 points - the highest of all people living at that time. By the way, by that time he already knew several dozen languages. Newspapers found out about him and called him “the smartest man in history.”





And then the difficulties began. William, while still a student himself, had already given lectures to first-year students. After one of them I went to bed. Probably with a nervous breakdown because the treatment took so long. And having become an adult, the guy said that he did not want any academic career - he was just tired.

Sidis dropped out of science, forgot about his career at Harvard and got a job as an accountant. He changed several offices, because as soon as his colleagues found out about his abilities, they began to pester him with questions. And he tried to communicate as little as possible and immediately changed jobs.

Unsociable and reserved, William still sometimes remembered his “genius” and wrote scientific articles and books on various topics. Then he had some kind of enlightenment and he stopped shying away from others. He even joined the communist movement - he was 21 years old at the time. And he almost went to prison for organizing a demonstration. Here he was saved by the intervention of his influential father - a famous scientist and not the last person at Harvard.



After this, William retired from politics and began writing books again. Among them are works on the history of American Indians, cosmology and psychology. The child prodigy has matured, but has not lost his mental alertness. But he became terribly sloppy in everyday life and behaved more and more eccentrically. Apparently, psychological experiments in childhood did not pass without a trace.

He died at 46 from a cerebral hemorrhage. He managed to do a lot, but he never showed any kind of genius that his father had been telling him about since childhood.