Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking may appear to be the brightest persons of all time, yet they just scratch the surface.

May I present to you William James Sidis, an American former child prodigy with an IQ ranging from 210 to 250?

For example, the average in the United Kingdom ranges between 85 and 115, whereas Einstein and Hawking scored around 160.

Sidis, therefore, stands apart from even the most accomplished scientists of the previous century—so why haven’t more people heard of him?

Sidis was born in New York on April 1, 1898, to Russian immigrants, and he was able to read the newspaper at the age of 18 months.

It’s worth mentioning that his father, Boris Sidis, was a well-known psychologist who specialized in psychopathology, and his mother, Sarah Mandelbaum Sidis, was a medical doctor.

Perhaps intelligence is hereditary after all.

Amy Wallace, the author of Sidis’ biography, stated that his parents pressured him to pursue knowledge regardless of what he wanted.

Before he turned ten, the youngster faced books, educational resources, and even psychological disputes.

At the age of eight, Sidis reportedly spoke eight languages, including his own, and at nine, Harvard University accepted him. I felt it was amazing to be able to kick a ball off the ground at that age.

However, Harvard required him to wait until he was 11 years old before enrolling, so he spent two years studying mathematics at Tufts University.

He reportedly spent hours correcting mistakes and reviewing Einstein’s well-known theory of relativity.

Though there are no report cards or grade marks for the prodigy, it is believed that he possessed an IQ 50–100 points higher than scientists of the twentieth century.

In 1909, Sidis became Harvard’s youngest student, and in his first year, he gave a lecture to the Harvard Mathematics Club on four-dimensional entities.

It’s safe to assume that he wowed numerous specialists.

Daniel F. Comstock, an American physicist and MIT professor at the time, predicted that “young Sidis will be a great astronomical mathematician, the leader in that science in the future.”

However, this is when his life began to take a dismal turn.

Being in university at such a young age impacted Sidis, who struggled to live a regular life while being mocked by peers and extensively watched by the media.

Wallace stated that he wants to ‘be a typical working man.'”.

Sidis previously told a reporter after graduating at 16 that he wanted to live ‘in isolation’ since he ‘always loathed crowds.'”.

After becoming an associate mathematics professor and writing a book on Euclidean geometry, he became dissatisfied with the treatment he received and returned to Harvard to study law. But after three years, he pulled out for undisclosed reasons.

Sidis became involved in socialist movements in 1919, when he was detained for participating in a communist-led antiwar rally.

He made headlines due to his famous position and received an 18-month prison sentence for assaulting an officer.

Sidis’ parents decided to house him in an MIT sanatorium while his father was at work.

He was freed in his early twenties and spent the remainder of his life hidden from the public, preferring not to exploit his remarkable mathematical ability.

He would work as a bookkeeper, adopt a fictitious identity, and move occupations and places if someone recognized him. However, Sidis continued to produce a variety of works, some under his true name and others under pseudonyms.

They would cover a wide range of themes, from American history to streetcar transfer tickets, and he even published a book on cosmology in 1925 called The Animate and the Inanimate, in which he anticipated dark holes.

This was 14 years before Chandrasekhar’s more well-known prophecies, yet Sidis remained in the shadows, evading his own parents.

In 1935, the genius authored a book named John W. Shattuck, which concentrated on parts of Native American history and invented a form of calendar that searched for leap years.

Sidis led a peaceful existence until 1937, when a story on him was published in The New Yorker, describing what happened to him after he escaped the spotlight.

He sued the journal for libel and breaching his privacy, finally prevailing in 1944, although he died of a cerebral hemorrhage later that year.