Genius?

I was browsing through Nomadlife's blogs and came across one that talked about a book on American history. A link snapped up in my head to this story I'd read about two years ago on the internet. It was about a young genius who's intellect was probably far ahead of any other in recorded human history. In his mid-teens, Willam Sidis was writing his own story of the Americas - culled from various sources - even from wampum belts of Native American tribes.

Here's an excerpt from the Prometheus Society's biography of the genius who died unmarried, misunderstood and forgotten at the age of 46.

"His name was William James Sidis, and his IQ was estimated at between 250 and 300 [8, p. 283]. At eighteen months he could read The New York Times, at two he taught himself Latin, at three he learned Greek. By the time he was an adult he could speak more than forty languages and dialects. He gained entrance to Harvard at eleven, and gave a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the Harvard Mathematical Club his first year. He graduated cum laude at sixteen, and became the youngest professor in history. He deduced the possibility of black holes more than twenty years before Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar published An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure. His life held possibilities for achievement that few people can imagine. Of all the prodigies for which there are records, his was probably the most powerful intellect of all. And yet it all came to nothing. He soon gave up his position as a professor, and for the rest of his life wandered from one menial job to another. His experiences as a child prodigy had proven so painful that he decided for the rest of his life to shun public exposure at all costs. Henceforth, he denied his gifts, refused to think about mathematics, and above all refused to perform as he had been made to do as a child. Instead, he devoted his intellect almost exclusively to the collection of streetcar transfers, and to the study of the history of his native Boston. He worked hard at becoming a normal human being, but never entirely succeeded. He found the concept of beauty, for example, to be completely incomprehensible, and the idea of sex repelled him."

Unrelated to what i normally write about - but history has many fascinating stories. This just seemed like one of them. Keep discovering!