He pillado este artculo en el internet y me conmovi el ltimo prrafo (lo coloqu en neg

rillas). Usar el traductor Google sino queda tan claro.

No. 969:
WILLIAM JAMES SIDIS
by John H. Lienhard
Click here for audio of Episode 969.
Today, a disturbing story about nerds in knicker pants. The University of Housto
n's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
William James Sidis was born in 1898 to Russian immigrants -- intellectual refug
ees from the pogroms. Sidis's father, Boris, was brilliant, and William James tr
ained him in psychology at Harvard. The boy's mother, Sarah, gave up her own med
ical ambitions to forge intellectual greatness in their young son.
Young Sidis could read at 18 months. He'd written four books and was fluent in e
ight languages before he was eight. He gave a Harvard seminar on the fourth dime
nsion at nine. He entered Harvard at eleven. He may've been the most intelligent
person who ever lived.
He was the brightest of an amazing group of prodigies at Harvard in 1909. The gr
oup included Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, and composer Roger Sessions.
Wiener, like Sidis, was the driven product of his parents' aim to create a ment
al giant.
Those awkward children suffered their isolated lives at a university that expect
ed Eastern finishing-school grace of its students. Sidis graduated at 16 and wen
t off to Rice University as a math professor. Rice students ridiculed the childi
sh Sidis for eight months. He finally gave up and went back to Harvard to study
law.
Sidis took up the socialist cause and was jailed in 1918 during a communist anti
-war rally. It was in jail that he met the only woman he ever loved, an Irish so
cialist named Martha Foley.
Meanwhile, the media hounded him. Sidis was determined to find privacy. He disav
owed his knowledge of mathematics. The only work he'd take was running calculati
ng machines. He poured his energies into his hobby -- collecting streetcar trans
fers.
And he wrote books -- some under his own name, others under pseudonyms. In 1925
he published a remarkable book on cosmology in which he predicted black holes --
14 years before Chandrasekhar did. But primarily he fled his childhood, and he f
led his parents.
When he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1944, he was still carrying Martha Fole
y's picture. She'd long since married someone else, but that didn't matter. Sidi
s could only love with his head. All his life he'd vigorously rejected sex, art,
music, or anything else that meant contact with the unwelcoming world outside h
is mind. His biographer, Amy Wallace, expresses her own anguish over that. She s
ays:
Let us hope that [future gifted] children will grow up in a world that, instead
of shunning them as oddities, will welcome and nurture their talents, ... and th
eir vision.
William James Sidis was not the first nor last child wounded by parents trying t
o create a trophy. Others have lamented the creative productivity we lost when S
idis dropped out of society. What I grieve is all the joy that his well-honed mi
nd should've given him -- all the joy that Sidis was never able to access.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the w
ay inventive minds work.