William James Sidis was perhaps the most famous child prodigy in American history. He spelled out words by the time he was a year old, read The New York Times at 18 months, spoke Latin and Greek by age 3. At 11, he enrolled at Harvard; at 16, he was hired as a professor of mathematics at what was then Rice Institute, in Houston. As an adult, though, he became fanatical about his privacy and would work only menial jobs. He died in 1944, at age 46. … Back to Article
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