人生的后半场

William James Sidis is perhaps the most intelligent man of all time. His father Boris Sidis is one of the inaugurators of preschool psychology in the 20th century. Boris and his wife, one of the few women obtained a medical degree and became a doctor after graduation, fled Ukraine for the reason of political and religious persecution and settled in New York. Sidis was their first child. As he inherited the couple's excellent genes, he was born to be a child prodigy and revealed remarkable talent at an early age. You may wonder how smart he is, he could read New York Times at 2, Homer's Epic in Greek and the Gallic War in Latin at 4, learnt anatomy and Aristotle's Logic on his own at 6, passed the entrance examination of MIT and simultaneously not only could speak Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Hebrew and Turkish fluently, but gave birth to a new language called Vendergood at 8, corrected mistakes of the logic manuscript of a Harvard professor at 10, and was formally admitted to Harvard as one of the youngest students of it at 11. At the time, he was very proficient in astrophysics and advanced mathematics, stood on the platform and showed thousands of people in the hall his research on four dimensional space and everyone drawn to it had high expectations for this rising star. He had been tipped by professors in MIT to be a great mathematician and the leading figure in the realm. Having graduated with honors from Harvard, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at 16. Anyway, Sidis' talent is half inherited, half gained through education. For his child, Boris was more of a psychologist doing all kinds of experiment on him than a kind father. At the time the child was born, the family spent their savings on books, maps and school supplies and crammed him with preschool curriculum. They hung English alphabet around Sidis' cot and spelled over and over again for him. As they replaced toys with textbooks, Sidis' boyhood was surrounded by all kinds of knowledge consisted of geometry, geography and foreign language. Without a friend to communicate and a single toy to entertain, Sidis was unable to make out the life of his contemporaries. Most of times, he behaved too calm and suppressed to be a child.