William James Sidis

William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with mathematical and linguistic skills, born in Boston in 1898 and active as a mathematician, linguist, historian and author. He entered Harvard University at age 11 and earned his Bachelor of Arts cum laude on 18 June 1914 at the age of 16. He wrote The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925, in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics, and he published his works under various pseudonyms. He was a graduate fellow working toward a doctorate, abandoned graduate study in mathematics for Harvard Law School in 1916 and withdrew in good standing in March 1919. He became famous first for his precocity and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from public life, and he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1944.