Meet the 11-Year-Old Harvard Student Who Outsmarted Einstein

William Sidis was born in 1898 in Boston, Massachusetts. And it didn’t take long for some to notice that there was something very special about Sidis. Reportedly, he could speak multiple languages by the time he was only eight years old. According to NPR, the boy could read the New York Times before he was two years old, and among the different languages he could speak were Latin, Turkish, and Hebrew.

Sidis was only 11 years old when he officially became enrolled at Harvard University. The school is one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, in the U.S. and one of the top schools in the world. However, Sidis was actually accepted into the school when he was only nine years old, but he was advised to wait a couple of years in order to mature a bit.

Albert Einstein is considered by many as one of the smartest, if not the smartest, human beings to ever live. However, what if we told you that a young Sidis had an IQ perhaps double that of Einstein’s? It’s estimated that his IQ was somewhere between 250 and 300. So, if he had such a high IQ, possibly the highest ever recorded, why didn’t he go on to change the world?

Sidis wasn’t the only smart member of his family. His father was a pretty famous psychologist, while his mother was a very talented doctor. Both of his parents had fled from other countries to America years before he was born. When his mother fled from Russia, the country was experiencing a series of religious persecutions, while his father fled his country due to political oppression. However, it’s hard to say if this had any bearing on a young Sidis.

Young Sidis’s education started early. His parents famously believed that you could teach genius, so that’s what they set out to do. According to NPR, his family spent all their savings on things like maps, books, and other educational items for Sidis. And it ended up paying off, at least in some way, because Sidis had started to master English before he could walk, and it wouldn’t be long before he’d pick up other languages.

Sidis’s father, Boris, was so sure of his parenting techniques that he wrote an entire book explaining his son’s progress. It was called Philistine and Genius. “We can at that early period awaken a love of knowledge which will persist through life,” he wrote. The 1911 book also harshly criticized the American education system, saying that it didn’t inspire the same love for learning that he tried to inspire in Sidis.

It’s hard to tell if Sidis’s father’s methods actually worked or if Sidis was simply already a genius when he was born. However, what’s not in dispute are some of the incredible achievements Sidis accomplished before he’d even hit puberty. The boy wrote an anatomy textbook when he was still a child, and he came up with his own formula for counting historical days when he was only five years old.

Some people just have a talent for learning multiple languages, and if you’ve ever doubted that, just take Sidis, for example. His own father had a knack for learning languages, but Sidis was on another level completely. By the age of six, he could speak English, Armenian, Turkish, Hebrew, Russian, German, French, and Latin. He’d also come up with his own language. If that isn’t incredible, then we don’t know what is.

Most child prodigies excel in one or two areas. For example, it’s not unheard of for a young person to excel at, say, music or math and just be average or slightly above it in other areas. However, that’s part of what made Sidis so special, according to his biographer, Amy Wallace. She told NPR, “One thing that was very unusual about [Sidis] compared to other child prodigies [is that] very few prodigies have multiple abilities.”

In Boris’s eyes, there was only a handful of places that offered the kind of opportunities and education that his son would benefit from, and one of those places was Harvard University. However, when he was accepted at just nine years old, the school advised Boris to wait a couple of years so that Sidis could emotionally mature. So, that’s exactly what Boris did, waiting until his son was 11 to enroll him.

When Sidis was enrolled at Harvard at just 11 years old, he became the youngest enrollee ever. His record still stands today. There are other young prodigies who were enrolled at Ivy League schools at the ages of 12, 13, and so on, but none as young as Sidis. However, there might be a good reason for that, and it could have to do with what happened to Sidis later on.

By all accounts, Sidis was extraordinarily talented, and all you have to really do to figure that out is take a look at his achievements. However, as one might expect, his IQ tells us the same thing. Abraham Sperling was a mathematician and psychologist who had a chance to administer an IQ test to Sidis. He later wrote of Sidis, “His [IQ] score was the highest that had ever been obtained.”

It’s not a stretch to say that Sidis may have been one of, if not the smartest person to ever live. His IQ would’ve been higher than Steven Hawking’s and Isaac Newton’s. So, it’s not hard to believe that at only 11 years old, he walked up to a podium at Harvard and went on to give a lecture at the Harvard Mathematical Club, no doubt turning a few heads in the process.

Sidis went on stage that day to talk about the mathematical concept of four-dimensional bodies, which is pretty advanced. There were mostly advanced students and some professors in the audience. One of those in attendance was Daniel Comstock, who was a faculty member and a physicist at MIT. It didn’t take long for Comstock to make a bold prediction about the young Sidis up on stage that day in 1910.

Comstock would later go on to write in his autobiography that he had very high hopes for Sidis. After seeing him in 1910, he said, “I predict that young Sidis will be a great astronomical mathematician. He will evolve new theories and invent new ways of calculating astronomical phenomena. I believe he will be a great mathematician, the leader in that science in the future,” according to his biography.

It didn’t take long for news to get out that the youngest-ever Harvard enrollee had started classes. The media at the time quickly picked up on the boy wonder, and the story captivated readers throughout the country. In fact, the media attention would never really fully go away. His story was one that pretty much everyone at the time had heard about. A fact that Sidis didn’t necessarily care for himself.

Famous architect Buckminster Fuller went to school at Harvard at the same time as Sidis, and what he had to say about him pretty much sums up Sidis’s time there. “Most students considered him a freak. He was 16 when I knew him, but his parents still sent him to school dressed like a boy of 12. In those days, a boy automatically put on long trousers when he was 14, but Willy Sidis still wore Little Lord Fauntleroy short pants and high-buttoned shoes,” he said.

Many within Harvard still expected great things from a young Sidis despite all the reports of teasing. It’s not hard to see why, considering his level of genius. However, during graduation, Sidis gave a speech that offered a look at what might become of him and how he felt about his time in academia. The speech was given in front of reporters in 1914, and it started off normal enough.

Sidis, in his speech, went on to say, “The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds.” His outlook on the world was one of pessimism, and he’d obviously been affected negatively by his experiences with other students while at Harvard. However, many immediately began to wonder if Sidis really was about to go and shut himself away from the rest of the world.

If people needed any other clues as to whether Sidis really did intend to shut himself off from the world, they needed to only look at the fact that he’d decided to swear off women and marriage. His decision was no doubt due to the teasing he’d suffered while in college. “All he wanted was to be away from academia [and] be a regular working man,” Wallace wrote in her biography of Sidis.

If Sidis was going to take up a teaching position anywhere, you might expect him to take one at Harvard or another prestigious Ivy League School. However, that’s not what happened. In fact, Sidis ended up having to leave Harvard because of alleged threats he’d received. So, he took a job teaching trigonometry and geometry at Rice University when he was still only 17 years old — much younger than his students.

When Sidis returned to Harvard, he decided to pursue different studies. He enrolled in law school and did quite well, by all accounts. Of course, that was probably to be expected. However, it wasn’t long before he dropped out once again. This time, he left Harvard in 1919. It was probably pretty apparent to anyone who was close to Sidis that something just wasn’t going right for the young man.

America wasn’t exactly known for protecting workers’ rights in the early 20th century. In fact, it was a time of mass protests, strikes, and socialist movements. During one of those socialist movements, Sidis found himself advocating for workers’ rights. He also found himself being arrested after he screamed, “To hell with the American flag.” We’re not sure what the legal reasoning for his arrest was, but the run-in with the law did make the news. The demonstration also ended up turning into a riot.

Again, this was a time in American history when a lot of people were very much opposed to socialism as they viewed it. So, when Sidis went on trial, and it was covered by the media, he didn’t exactly make any friends. It was revealed that he supported the Russian Revolution, in addition to being a pacifist and a socialist. This wasn’t long after the end of World War I.

At first, the judge had decided to sentence Sidis to 18 months in prison, which would’ve no doubt been extremely difficult for him. However, Sidis’s father stepped in and offered to instead give him psychological help. The judge agreed and released Sidis on parole. No doubt, it helped that Boris was a famous psychologist at the time. From there, Sidis was sent to his father’s institution in New Hampshire.

Sidis wasn’t exactly flattering in describing his father’s facility. He later said that his time there equated to “mental torture.” There isn’t much evidence beyond that to say for sure what happened during his time at the facility, but it’s pretty clear that he didn’t enjoy it. When he was released, he doubled down on living a life that didn’t involve outside pressure from society or from his parents.

After leaving school, Sidis took on a number of blue-collar jobs. Reportedly, he even went by a couple of different names during this time in his life. He also moved from city to city, often taking the same types of jobs. It was all done in an effort to lay low and stay out of the spotlight. And it worked for a while. Despite his genius and his history, he was able to blend in with the rest of society pretty seamlessly.

Despite trying to lay low, it wasn’t long before a reporter found him in New York City, where he was working as a machine operator, making around $23 a week. The world had wanted to know what happened to Sidis, who was one of the smartest people to ever live. It turned out he’d been taking similar jobs wherever he moved to. However, he hadn’t completely given up his academic pursuits during this time.

By this point in his life, he’d not really been in contact with his parents. They’d probably hung over the rest of his life like a large rain cloud, and he wanted to do things his own way. That might be why he continued to write throughout his life, especially during the years when he was taking menial jobs. He published The Animate and the Inanimate in 1925, which dealt with his own theory of life and the cosmos.

We’re not exactly sure if Sidis began writing under different pen names as a response to The Animate and the Inanimate being ignored or if he was just trying to stay out of the spotlight. Either way, he went on to publish many more titles under all kinds of different names right up until his death. However, that has also complicated things a bit for historians and those wanting to learn more about Sidis.

While it’s unknown just how many books he actually authored, it’s probably safe to say there are quite a few out there. When it comes to books that were written under his name, we only really know of two that were written by him when he was an adult. The first was The Animate and the Inanimate, and the second was called The Tribes and the States. The latter dealt with the history of Native Americans.

Due to his extensive use of pseudonyms, it’s not actually known how many lost books by Sidis are actually out there. We do know that he published Notes on the Collection of Transfers under the name Frank Folupa in the 1920s. However, it wasn’t nearly as serious as some of his other works, and he appears to just be exploring one of his fascinations in the book — streetcars and trolleys.

By many accounts, Sidis would regularly move from city to city, and he was something of an intellectual nomad. When he slipped up, and people started to get an idea about just how intelligent he was, he’d simply pack up and start over in a new city. Sidis was so averse to the spotlight by this time that he took great precautions to make sure he wouldn’t be found out.

The female reporter had been sent by The New Yorker to befriend Sidis and write an article about what had happened to him, according to Wallace. The reporter found him and, in 1937, released an article detailing his story. “The very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill,” Sidis was quoted as saying. He also said that all he wanted to do was to continue to work the same types of jobs he’d worked for the past couple of years. When he was asked why he thought he didn’t live up to predictions about him, he responded, “It’s strange, but, you know, I was born on April Fool’s Day.”

“Sidis thought the article’s description of him was humiliating,” according to NPR. So, he decided to come out of hiding, and his first order of business was to sue The New Yorker for libel. He went on to try and prove that the article had caused “grievous mental anguish [and] humiliation,” Wallace said. However, luck wasn’t on his side at the time, as his case was initially thrown out by the court.

All of the attention from the lawsuit meant that the world was once again getting a peak as to what happened to Sidis. Not only that, but the case is still remembered today as an important case in American history and privacy law. Despite putting in years of effort to remain out of the spotlight and continue to live life as a normal person, Sidis was making headlines once again.

Sidis did eventually prevail in his case against The New Yorker. However, it had taken years since the article was published, and he didn’t get the verdict he wanted until 1944. Unfortunately, he suffered a brain hemorrhage that very same year. It’s worth noting that his father also suffered a brain hemorrhage decades before. At the time, Sidis was working at the State Department of Unemployment Compensation, performing clerical services.

While Sidis had finally managed to live a life under the radar for the majority of his time on Earth, he is still remembered somewhat today. Whether that be for his role as a boy genius, his authorship, or his part in U.S. legal history, his name hasn’t been completely erased from the history books. And although his life was short, by many accounts, Sidis had been able to largely overcome some of the early difficulties he’d had.