Of course we all know you’re the world’s smartest human. However, I’ve heard about this guy, William James Sidis, who might have been the world’s smartest person when he was alive. Harvard’s youngest graduate, he was a lightning calculator and a linguistic genius, supposedly publishing papers anticipating the existence of black holes and other astronomical phenomena. On the other hand, he lived in obscurity, on the run from the law, and frankly most of his writings sound like gobbledy-gook to me, not that I’m any judge. For the world’s smartest man, his name is conspicuously absent from my textbooks on science or philosophy. So, Cece baby, what’s the straight dope? Was Sidis a misunderstood genius or a kook savant? –Dutch Courage, via the Internet, Youngstown, Ohio
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Yeah, like there’s a difference. All we know is that Sidis, celebrated as a prodigy in his youth, produced virtually nothing of consequence as an adult. One of his major contributions to world literature was a book about streetcar transfers, which a biographer described as “the most boring book ever written.” A few have professed to find deep meaning in this work and believe Sidis’s many unpublished writings would yield great truths if only we lesser folk (well, you lesser folk) had the wit to understand them. But the more common explanation is that he was a gifted lad who was pushed too far too fast.
After that, nothing. Estranged from his parents, Sidis worked for the rest of his life as a bookkeeper or at other jobs incommensurate with his talents. He seldom socialized, for that matter seldom bathed, and he spent his off-hours working on obscure manuscripts. The only book he published under his own name was The Animate and the Inanimate (1925), a philosophical work that his admirers claim anticipated the theory of black holes. In 1923 the newspapers reported that he was working as a $23-a-week clerk in New York City. The press paid him no further notice until 1937, when the New Yorker ran a piece entitled “April Fool” that poked fun at his lowly station. Sidis sued and eventually received a small settlement. He died in 1944.
