William James Sidis, the most intelligent being who ever lived

He was born in New York in 1898 and went down in history as the man with the highest IQ ever measured, with a score of 254. He lived a sad and mixed life with the people of his time, and many of his brilliant works were not appreciated until decades later. It is said that he was able to speak (literally) as many as 25 languages.

At only eighteen months (it is said) he could read The New York Times. At eight years of age he learned eight languages on his own and without assistance, including Latin and Greek, and even invented his own language which he called ‘Vendergood’.

When he was eleven, he entered Harvard and at sixteen he obtained a Bachelor of Arts cum laude, while at seventeen he began to devote himself to his doctorate “writing in Greek a lecture for the course in Euclidean geometry”.

Sadly, his boundless intelligence and great achievements soon earned him the hatred of his students and the envy of his colleagues, which led him to leave teaching and take refuge in New England in disappointment and bitterness; the news appeared in all the American newspapers of the time.

He unfortunately died in 1944 at the age of 46 from a cerebral hemorrhage.