You may think that the likes of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking are the smartest people who have ever lived, but they barely scrape the tip of the iceberg.
May I introduce you to William James Sidis, an American former child prodigy who boasted an IQ between 210 and 250.
For reference, the UK's average is between 85 and 115, while Einstein and Hawking had scores around 160.
Advert
Sidis then, is a class apart from even the most gifted scientists of the last 100 years - but why haven't many people heard of him?
Sidis was born on 1 April 1898 in New York to immigrants from the Russian Empire, and could read the newspaper at just 18-months-old.
It's worth noting that his father, Boris Sidis, was a well-known psychologist known for his work in Psychopathology, and his mother, Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, was a medical doctor.
Advert
Maybe intelligence is hereditary, after all.
The author behind Sidis' biography, Amy Wallace, said his parents put pressure on him to seek knowledge, regardless of what he wanted. Books, educational materials and even psychological debates were thrown at the boy before he had even reached double digits in age.
When he was eight, Sidis allegedly spoke eight languages, created his own, and when he was nine, he was accepted into Harvard University. And I thought being able to kick a ball off the ground at that age was impressive.
Harvard made him wait until he was 11 to be enrolled though, so he spent two years studying maths at Tufts University.
Advert
It is said that he spent time correcting mistakes and going through Einstein's famous theory of relativity.
Though there are no existed report cards or grade scores of the genius, it is thought that he had an IQ score 50-100 points higher than scientists of the 20th century.
In 1909, Sidis became the youngest student to study at Harvard, and in his first year, he delivered a presentation on four-dimensional bodies to the Harvard Mathematics Club.
Advert
It's fair to say that he impressed several experts.
American Physicist Daniel F. Comstock, a professor at MIT at the time, suggested: “I predict that young Sidis will be a great astronomical mathematician, the leader in that science in the future”.
But this is when his life would take a sad turn.
Being at university at such a young age had a toll on Sidis, who struggled to live a normal life, being made fun of by students and being closely followed by media.
Advert
Wallace claimed that he wanted to 'be a regular working man'.
Sidis once told a reporter after graduating aged 16 that he wants to live 'in seclusion', as he 'always hated crowds'.
After becoming an assistant mathematics professor and publishing a book on Euclidean geometry, he got annoyed at being treated badly and went back to Harvard to study law. But just three years in, he dropped out for unknown reasons.
Sidis became embroiled in socialist causes in 1919, becoming arrested for being part of a communist-led anti-war tally.
His celebrity status meant that he made headlines, and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars after assaulting an officer.
Sidis' parents would strike an agreement for him to be held at a sanatorium under his father at MIT while working.
Now in his early twenties, he was released and spent the rest of his life away from the public, and didn't want to make use of his outstanding knowledge of mathematics anymore.
He would work as a book-keeper, used a fake name, and changed jobs and cities if someone recognised him. However, Sidis would still write a number of books, some in his real name, with others under pseudonyms.
They would range in topics, from the history of the USA to streetcar transfer tickets, even publishing a book on cosmology in 1925 titled The Animate and the Inanimate, where he predicted black holes.
This was 14 years before the better-known predictions made by Chandrasekhar, but Sidis still lived in the shadows, even fleeing his own parents.
The genius then wrote a book in 1935 called John W. Shattuck, focused on the aspects of Native American history, while also inventing a type of calendar that looked for leap years.
Sidis lived a quiet life until an article was published about him in The New Yorker back in 1937, documenting what happened to him since escaping the public eye.
He accused the magazine of libel and violating his privacy, filing a lawsuit and eventually winning in 1944, though he sadly died of a brain haemorrhage later that year.
Joshua Nair