William James Sidis Was The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived — But He Died A Low-Level Office Clerk

The IQ of William James Sidis

Much speculation has been made over the years about William Sidis’ IQ. Any records of his IQ testing have been lost to time, so modern-day historians are forced to estimate.

For context, 100 is considered an average IQ score, while below 70 is often viewed as substandard. Anything above 130 is considered gifted or very advanced.

Some historical IQs that have been reverse-analyzed include Albert Einstein with 160, Leonardo da Vinci with 180, and Isaac Newton with 190.

As for William James Sidis, he had an estimated IQ of around 250 to 300.

Anybody with a high IQ will be happy to tell you it’s meaningless (though they’ll probably still be a little smug). But Sidis was so smart that his IQ was the same amount as three average human beings combined.

But despite his intelligence, he struggled to fit in with a world full of people who didn’t understand him.

After he graduated from Harvard at age 16, he told reporters, “I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds.”

The boy wonder’s plan worked about as well as you would think, especially for a person who had already been famous for so long.

For a short period of time, he taught mathematics at Rice Institute in Houston, Texas. But he was all but driven out, partially due to the fact that he was younger than many of his students.

William Sidis briefly courted controversy when he was arrested at a Boston May Day Socialist March in 1919. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for rioting and assaulting a police officer, but he had actually done neither.

That said, Sidis was determined to live in quiet solitude after his brush with the law. He took on a series of menial jobs, such as low-level accounting work. But whenever he was recognized or his colleagues learned who he was, he would promptly quit.

“The very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill,” he later complained. “All I want to do is run an adding machine, but they won’t let me alone.”

In 1937, Sidis entered the spotlight for a final time when The New Yorker ran a patronising article about him. He decided to sue for invasion of privacy and malicious libel, but the judge dismissed the case.

Now a classic in privacy law, the judge ruled that once a person is a public figure, they’re always a public figure.

After he lost his appeal, the once idolized Sidis didn’t live too much longer. In 1944, he died of cerebral hemorrhage at age 46.

Found by his landlady, the most intelligent man known to modern history left Earth as a penniless, reclusive office clerk.