God Gives The World A Gift

William James Sidis was born to Russian Jewish immigrants on April 1, 1898 in New York City.

His father, Boris Sidis

The father was a Russian immigrant (running from John Law) arrived in 1887. His mother, Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, M.D., and her family had fled the pogroms about 1889. Boris completed four degrees at Harvard, the B.A., M.A., Ph.D., and M.D., and studied under William James. 
 

Harvard and college life (1909–1915)

Sidis set a record in 1909 by becoming the youngest person to enroll at Harvard College. He was 11 years old, and entered Harvard as part of a program to enroll gifted students early. The experimental group included mathematician Norbert Wiener, Richard Buckminster Fuller, and composer Roger Sessions.

Harvard Gentiles Repulsed At The Obnoxious Pervert

After a gang of Harvard students threatened to beat him up, his parents secured him a job at the William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art in Houston, Texas as a mathematics teaching assistant.

He arrived at Rice in December 1915 at age 17. He was a Graduate Fellow working towards his doctorate.
 

He Refused The Draft

During the trial, Sidis stated that he had been a conscientious objector of the World War I draft, did not believe in a god, and that he was a socialist

Sidis Shows His Communist Roots

In 1919, shortly after his withdrawal from law school, Sidis was arrested for participating in a socialist May Day parade in Boston that turned into a scuffle. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 for rioting and assault. 

A Friendly States Attorney

His father made an arrangement with the district attorney to keep him out of prison before his appeal came to trial; his parents, instead, held him in their sanitorium in New Hampshire for a year.

Sidis Fled The Law

As the seditionist realized that he was going to jail, he decided to flee to California. He spent the next few years dodging 'John Law'.

Sidis From 1920 Till 1945

After escaping back to the East Coast in 1921, he worked in New York City and it was years before he was cleared to return to Massachusetts, and he remained concerned of possible arrest for years. He devoted himself to publishing periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history.

In 1944, Sidis won a settlement from The New Yorker for publishing an article about him in 1937, which he alleged contained many false statements.  Under the title "Where Are They Now?", the pseudonymous article described Sidis's life as lonely, in a "hall bedroom in Boston's shabby South End".

Sidis died in 1944 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Boston at the age of 46.[19] His father had died of the same malady in 1923 at age 56.
 

The Legend Begins

Abraham Sperling, director of New York City's Aptitude Testing Institute, said after Sidis' death that according to his calculations, Sidis "easily had an IQ between 250 and 300" and that there was no evidence that his intellect had declined in adulthood.