WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS – A Child Prodigy with Exceptional Mathematical and Linguistic Skills

An American child prodigy with mathematical and linguistic skills, William James Sidis, was born in April 1898. Intelligent parents, Boris and Sarah, raised a former Child Prodigy. Boris was a famous psychologist, and Sarah was a doctor. They started spending their high earned money on the education of William. They used to spend on books and maps to encourage their learning of a child.

The fortunate name was given after his godfather, Boris’ friend and colleague, the philosopher William James. Sidis invented a new language called Vendergood. His parents were famous for the way of nurturing and teaching.

Early Life and College Life

The parents of William wanted him to go to university at the age of 9. University had refused to let his father enroll him at age nine initially. He was still a child then. Sidis was the youngest to attend college in 1909 and set the record for the same. He stunned everyone with the lecture that he imparted at Harvard Mathematical Club in early 1910. He was a master of Mathematics.

1. A former and notable child prodigy, Norbert Wiener, who also attended Harvard, knew Sidis. He later gave a mention 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.”

 2.    Daniel F. Comstock, MIT physics professor was fond of Sidis and full of praises,:”Karl Friedrich Gauss is the only example in history to whom Sidis resembles”. He believed that young Sidis would evolve new theories and invent new ways of calculating astronomical phenomena. He firmly knew that Sidis would be a great leader in that science in the future.

Later Life

He always wanted to live a perfect life, and some papers reported that Sidis wanted to remain celibate and never marry. Later, he had a very potent feeling for Martha Foley, who was one year older than him. Also, he enrolled himself at Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS Achievements

 According to goodreads.com, Sidis was also a peridromophile. The term peridromophile came to notice when Sidis was considered to be one. It means a person fascinated with transportation research and streetcar systems. We have included few below.

1. He is famous for the 1920 book The Animate and the Inanimate, in which he theorized about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.

 2.   Sidis taught three classes: Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, and freshman math. However, he was not satisfied with the working and teaching requirement there.

Sidis was portrayed to be a wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment.

Newspapers used to criticize Boris Sidis’ child-rearing nurturing methods. Others believed Sidis’ manner of upbringing occurred within a larger discourse about the best way to educate children.

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