William James Sidis - Legacy

Legacy

Abraham Sperling, director of New York City's Aptitude Testing Institute, allegedly said after Sidis' death that according to his calculations, Sidis "easily had an IQ between 250 and 300", meaning that at some time his intellectual age was 2.5 to 3 times his actual age (not the same scale as modern deviation IQ). However, it was later acknowledged that some of his biographers, such as Amy Wallace, exaggerated how high his IQ actually was and exactly what Sperling had claimed. Sperling actually stated “Helena Sidis told me that a few years before his death, her brother Bill took an intelligence test with a psychologist. His score was the very highest that had ever been obtained. In terms of I.Q., the psychologist related that the figure would be between 250 and 300. Late in life William Sidis took general intelligence tests for Civil Service positions in New York and Boston. His phenomenal ratings are matter of record.”

It has been acknowledged that Helena and William's mother Sarah had developed a reputation to exaggerate claims about the Sidis family. Helena had also falsely claimed that the Civil Service exam William took in 1933 was an IQ test and that his ranking of 254 was an IQ score of 254. Helena also claimed that "Billy knew all the languages in the world, while my father only knew twenty-seven. I wonder if there were any Billy didn’t know." This claim was not backed by any other source outside the Sidis family and Sarah Sidis also made an improbable claim in her 1950 book The Sidis Story that William could learn a language in just one day.

Boris Sidis once dismissed tests of intelligence as "silly, pedantic, absurd, and grossly misleading." Sperling commented:

"What the journalists did not report, and perhaps did not know, was that during all the years of his obscure employments he was writing original treatises on history, government, economics and political affairs. In a visit to his mother's home I was permitted to see the contents of a trunkful of original manuscript material that Bill Sidis composed."

Sidis' life and work, particularly his ideas about Native Americans, are extensively discussed in Robert M. Pirsig's book Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991). Sidis is also discussed in Ex-Prodigy, an autobiography by mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who was a prodigy himself and a contemporary of Sidis at Harvard.

A Danish author, Morten Brask, wrote a fictional novel based on Sidis' life; "The Perfect Life of William Sidis" was published in Denmark in 2011.