CHAPTER 1

The Wonder Boys of Harvard

· 1 ·

“The first thing my April Fool’s boy wanted from the great outside world was the moon,” wrote a young mother named Sarah Sidis, recalling her firstborn’s arrival in the family on the cusp of the twentieth century.

We stood at the window of the apartment together in the evening, with Billy in Boris’ arms, and admired the moon over Central Park. Billy chuckled and reached for it. The next night when he found that the moon was not in the same place, he seemed disturbed. Trips to the window became a nightly ritual, and he was always pleased when he could see the “moo-n.”

This led to Billy’s mastering higher mathematics and planetary revolutions by the time he was eleven, and if that seems to be a ridiculous statement I can only say, “Well, it did.”

The moon-gazing scene is a classic parental experience, a memory likely to stick, even if it goes unrecorded in a baby book. A brilliant sphere or sliver hangs in the sky. The baby arm reaches out, pointing, and the round eyes are even brighter than usual as they look first at the moon, then into your eyes, then back at the light out there in the darkness. “Moon,” you say, a word almost as mesmerizing, in English, as the sight. The tiny lips purse, and out comes a sound that no cow could imitate. “Yes, moon,” you say again, and the future seems full of promise for a young soul excited by a new word and fascinated by the view. This baby, who doesn’t want to turn away, will surely go far in life—and in the cool moonglow, you feel thrilled and perhaps also a little terrified at what may be in store for both of you.

Sarah Sidis told her unusual version of the story years after the birth on April 1, 1898, of one of the first, and for a time most famous, child prodigies of the modern era. Billy’s full name was William James Sidis, after the renowned Harvard psychologist who was her husband’s mentor and the boy’s godfather. At eleven, enrolled at Harvard, Billy made headlines when he delivered a lecture on the fourth dimension to the university’s Mathematical Club, “with the aid of a crayon which he wielded with his little hand,” wrote The New York Times.

By then Sarah and her husband, Boris, had made it their mission to jolt turn-of-the-century Americans with a thrilling, and terrifying, message: learning, if it was begun soon enough, could yield phenomenal results very early and rapidly. Russian Jews, they had fled the pogroms in Ukraine for the garment sweatshops on the United States’ East Coast in the mid-1880s. Within ten years they had worked their way to the top of American higher education. Sarah, by 1898 a rare woman with an M.D. (from Boston University School of Medicine), considered her husband “the most brilliant man in the world.” After tutoring Sarah, Boris had racked up a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard within four years. But inborn talent had nothing to do with their feats, or their son’s, they insisted. Billy was not miraculous, and Boris’s brilliance was more honed than inherited. (Reared in a polyglot world by a bookish merchant, he had been multilingual and a voracious young reader, who boldly began educating peasants as a teenager—for which he was imprisoned by the tsar.) The long-standing fear that precocity was the prelude to early degeneracy was groundless. An as-yet-unimagined potential lay in every child, and it was time parents started cultivating it, Boris urged. The country, more than ever, needed “the individuality, the originality, the latent powers of talent and genius” too often wasted.

Their zeal will sound familiar, echoed by current apostles of the “10,000 hour rule” of “deliberate practice,” begun the younger the better. The impatience with low expectations remains a refrain. So does the warning that if we heedlessly neglect childhood opportunities to excel, we’re jeopardizing a valuable national resource. The opposite concern, conveyed by William James in a letter, is alive and well, too. “I congratulate you on W.J.S.—what you tell of him is wonderful,” he wrote of his four-year-old godson in 1902. But he was clearly alarmed. “Exercise his motor activities exclusively for many years now! His intellect will take care of itself,” he told Boris. Did James realize that the rest of his letter—he cited a Harvard colleague’s prodigious son as a cautionary example—risked egging the Sidises on? That problem is familiar as well. James noted that the university’s first professor of Slavic languages, Leo Wiener—another remarkable émigré from tsarist Russia (he had taken the Bialystok high school entrance exams at ten and knew that many languages by his teens)—was several steps further along with his phenomenal son, Norbert. “Now at the age of seven,” James reported, the boy “has done all the common school work, and of course can’t get into the high school, so that his father is perplexed what to do with him, since they make difficulties about admitting him to the manual training schools in Cambridge.”

Seven years later, when both boys converged on Harvard—there was no stopping the mission—their fathers, with Boris in the lead, had the eye and ear of the public as they sounded a democratic call to Americans to get busy enriching their children’s fast-growing minds. An influx of underage standouts at the nation’s most prestigious university put them all in the spotlight. In the fall of 1909, Norbert, almost fifteen, arrived as a graduate student in zoology after getting his B.A. in math at Tufts in three years. Billy, now known as William, was admitted at eleven as a “special student.” They were joined by two children of the Reverend Adolf Berle, an ambitious Congregationalist minister in Boston—Adolf Jr., fourteen, and his sister, Lina, fifteen, at Radcliffe—and a scion of a blue-blooded Boston family, Cedric Houghton, also fifteen. (The following fall, a fourteen-year-old musician named Roger Sessions enrolled.)

The two superprecocious sons of the immigrant professor and doctor, outspoken men with bushy mustaches and accents, inspired the most interest—and the most suspense. The world was in ferment, and Harvard along with it. The basic contours of the flux haven’t changed. A new century of global migration and international tensions was under way. The pace of scientific progress had picked up. The fledgling field of psychology was taking off—Freud visited the United States in 1909—and Einstein’s revolutionary papers of 1905 had stirred baffled interest. The arrival of these brilliant boys, with their unusual pedigrees, fit the mission of Harvard’s outgoing president, Charles W. Eliot, a liberal Boston Brahmin and staunch believer in equality of opportunity. He aimed to open university doors to “men with much money, little money, or no money, provided that they all have brains.” And not just brains, Eliot warned complacent WASPs, who mistook “an indifferent good-for-nothing, luxurious person, idling through the precious years of college life” for an ideal gentleman or scholar. Eliot had in mind an elite with “the capacity to prove by hard work that they have also the necessary perseverance and endurance.”

Boris and Leo, more radically egalitarian than Eliot, promised that anyone’s children could soar like their sons—and do so without undue strain, if parents were prompt enough and pursued the right methods. The prospect stirred great interest, but also wariness, on campus and beyond. A. Lawrence Lowell, Eliot’s far stuffier Brahmin successor, was said to worry that the “new immigrants” from Eastern and Southern Europe just didn’t mix well with the “Anglo-Saxon race,” whose ascendancy he assumed. “What will become of the wonder child?” asked a New York Times article announcing William’s arrival at Harvard. The attention was tinted with suspicion: “Will he go the way commonly supposed to be that of most boy prodigies,” the Times went on, “or will he make a name for himself?” Boris had just given a speech at the Harvard summer school about liberating youthful genius. Norbert’s father was ready with the assurance that his son “was not forced. He is even lazy.” For one boy, an embattled and lonely quest for privacy lay ahead. For the other, a formative role in the information age awaited. More emblematic fates for two pioneering modern prodigies would be hard to find—which doesn’t mean that one path is a model and the other neatly conveys a cautionary moral. Both, as the boys understood sooner and better than their fathers did, were minefields.

· 2 ·

“I tried at one time to unite the five of us into a sort of prodigy club, but the attempt was ridiculous for we did not possess a sufficient element of coherence to make a joint social life desirable,” Norbert Wiener wrote years later in his memoir Ex-Prodigy. The effort was a valiant, and rather poignant, gesture by a teenager well versed in the struggle to fit in while standing out.

In all of our cases, our social relations were better taken care of elsewhere than by a close social contact with those of our own kind. We were not cut from the same piece of cloth, and in general there was nothing except an early development of intelligence that characterized us as a group. And this was no more a basis for social unity than the wearing of glasses or the possession of false teeth.

When they arrived on campus in Cambridge, he and William certainly bore no physical resemblance. Round-faced Norbert was a stocky adolescent verging on plump—though he went to the gym every day, an article noted. Short and clumsy and severely myopic, he wore thick wire-rim glasses. There was no disguising that he was a “greasy grind,” the collegiate term for scholarly types. But having already graduated to long pants, at least he wasn’t obviously underage. In a photograph that circulated in the avid newspaper coverage that fall, Norbert looked like an unpriggish goody-goody. He conveyed confidence, a bow tie setting off a sober yet open expression. William, in bangs and short pants, was still very much a child. He sometimes even wore the neckerchief that was part of a grade-schooler’s uniform. What was most striking about the photograph of him that kept cropping up wasn’t the odd farmer-boy hat on his head, accentuating his stick-out ears. It was the sullen set to his mouth and his aggrieved gaze.

Their backgrounds blurred, though, in the welcoming press accounts that greeted the unusual new students. That fit right in with their fathers’ overarching purpose. Boris and Leo presented their sons and themselves as readily imitable examples, cut from a common cloth. As one headline in a long feature about “Harvard’s Four Child Students” put it, “Parents Declare Others Might Do Likewise.” Their boys had started out no different from other “bright” children. Their new methods were neither customized nor complicated—nor coercive. But they could work wonders. They opened “up to the human race vistas of possibilities and achievement unreached in any epoch of the history of the world.” So announced the Boston journalist and popularizer of psychology H. Addington Bruce, who claimed prime magazine space at a time when compulsory schooling laws were spreading, along with “child study” groups and new interest in early development. As Boris and Leo’s self-appointed quasi-publicist, Bruce created a de facto prodigy-fathers club.

It was a club whose maverick members were far too busy with their own work to hold any meetings, and whose educational mission definitely needed Bruce’s rhetorical polish. With his recent 1909 Harvard summer school address, “Philistine and Genius,” Boris had invited dismissal as a Cassandra. He issued dire warnings of catastrophic violence ahead for a benighted world that schooled its children in fear and obedient conformity, suppressing “the genius of the young.” As for Leo, his son later noted that he “could be overwhelming through the very impact of his personality, and he was constitutionally incapable of allowing for his own forcefulness.” That was a polite way of saying he could be a bully.

Yet with Bruce’s genteel help, Boris and Leo drew notice as the opposite of Old World scolds as their boys arrived at Harvard. There was no hint of the duress that Isaac Babel (Norbert Wiener’s exact contemporary) later evoked in his famous short story “The Awakening.” Among Jewish families back in Odessa, a prodigy industry churned out little violin virtuosi—“with thin necks like the stalks of flowers, and a paroxysmic flush upon their cheeks”—to satisfy their parents’ dreams of cultural distinction if not fortune. The young marvels in Cambridge were not to be mistaken for New World freaks either. They bore no resemblance to lopsided “lightning calculators” like Zerah Colburn, a Vermont farm boy born in 1804 whose father had toured him through Europe: big-headed wonders able to “perform vast sums in arithmetic, as some children have done,” as Boris put it. “Mere ‘reckoning machines,’ ” Bruce called such specimens, noting their otherwise often limited horizons. These émigré fathers promised that to cultivate well-rounded early genius was to reap, later on, a “liberal-minded citizen, devoted soul and body to the interests of social welfare.”

Boris and Leo boasted an enlightened modern advance beyond even the most illustrious Anglo-Saxon precedent. John Stuart Mill, the outstanding prodigy of a century earlier, had surged ahead on his father’s chilly regimen, only to suffer a depressive crisis as he reached maturity. His American counterparts got the same basic, and humbling, paternal message the young Mill did—that their only real distinction was having a father, as James Mills indicated, “willing to give the necessary trouble and time” to teach them. But they had the advantage of a curriculum weighted toward science, believed more suited to “children’s needs of the concrete,” one doctor noted, than the Millian diet of classics, heavy on abstractions.

Norbert and Billy also thrived on cutting-edge pedagogical insights that promised to banish old-fashioned fears of debilitating precocity produced by “forcing.” Children’s “minds are built with use,” Boris taught, their brains undergoing rapid growth beginning in infancy. Seizing the window between two and three was crucial, and teaching must also appeal to their feelings. Boris’s signature contribution was “the psychology of suggestion.” Fascinated by hypnosis, he advocated the well-timed use of unconscious, emotionally charged associations and urged subtle priming to stimulate a child’s interest; the mind, he advised, was especially receptive before sleep.

Boris also promoted the theory of “reserve energy.” He claimed co-credit with William James for discovering this idea of “second wind,” which Leo swore by, too. Hitherto unknown levels of energy were accessible to those with real focus, the psychologists had decided. For adults, the emphasis was on endurance, working through initial fatigue to draw on otherwise unused sources of mental strength. The application to children, who were naturally given to scattered interests, was breezier. The point was to inspire effortless, deep absorption, which fueled the kind of learning that late-starters never tapped into. Once bad habits set in and vulnerable young minds were clouded by superstitious nonsense and fears—the crass staples of American child-rearing—the moment had been missed.

Lessons, harnessing imaginations that might otherwise wander, needn’t be long or onerous. The ideal result, far from a frail-necked specialist, was an accomplished generalist who thrived on a varied curriculum. Though Boris made no mention of group activities, he picked up on the refrain of the contemporary kindergarten movement: purposeful play. “That is the key to the whole situation,” he liked to emphasize. “Get the child so interested in study that study will truly be play.” Leo stressed the anticram theme and the importance of following a child’s inclinations. His son Norbert didn’t “learn by [rote], as a parrot might, but by reasoning.” Leo took a swipe at a school system that rewarded not “the child who thinks best but the one who remembers most”—and that shut its doors for months each year. Summer breaks were “one of the absurdities of American life,” the Reverend Berle agreed, when children “absolutely forget that they [have] brains…which must be kept active in developing habits of observation, attention and self-control.”

Boris and Leo didn’t have brain scans to back up theories very similar to notions that now carry the imprimatur of the lab—about early brain plasticity, the benefits of exploratory play, the creative experience of “flow,” the problem of extended school vacations. Instead they lucked into extraordinarily curious and focused boys who supplied evidence that went to their fathers’ heads. Boris and Leo could generalize grandly as William and Norbert arrived at Harvard because they could point to amazing results in sons who were not narrow prodigies at all—although they were hardly average children either. The boys’ pre-Harvard feats, often jumbled by an initially awed press eager for anecdotes, merged into an updated version of John Stuart Mill’s trajectory. Which boy had accomplished what by when wasn’t the point: they were an amalgam of the wonder child hidden in every child.

The milestones began with mastery of the alphabet before two and full literacy by three or four. Norbert drew letters in the sand with a nursemaid; Billy had ABC blocks dangling in his crib and his parents played letter games with him. Avid reading ensued, mostly of nonfiction. The boys then speedily amassed languages (Latin, Greek, German, French, and Russian for both, and some Hebrew, Turkish, and Armenian for Billy). Their intense scientific interests (anatomy and astronomy for Billy, chemistry and naturalist zeal for Norbert) inspired unusual strides before school age as well.

At which point—keeping up with Mill, who wrote a history of Rome at six—the wonder boys became eager knowledge producers as well as consumers. Between six and eight, Billy was especially busy. He invented his own language, Vendergood, and wrote a forty-page explication of it, in a style that veered from whimsical to pompous. He designed a grammar for teaching three languages at once and, according to his list of authorial accomplishments, also produced an astronomy textbook. Surely spurred on by Boris’s prolific psychological output, Billy turned a passion for calendars into a primer, too. At eleven, while his father was toiling away on a translation of the total Tolstoy oeuvre, Norbert wrote a paper on “The Theory of General Ignorance.” Carefully copied over in ink in a brown notebook, it represented his own step-by-step philosophizing, not a presentation of others’ views. Leo, understandably impressed by his son’s lucid argument for “the impossibility of man’s being certain of anything,” rewarded him with a special trip to Maine.

· 3 ·

Yet of course neither the men nor the boys—nor their families—were cut from the same cloth at all. That much was certain, a grown-up Norbert noted in his memoir. Their intellectual feats lumped them together as fascinating new Harvard outliers. But as Norbert appreciated in retrospect, and seems to have intuited even as a boy, what really mattered was how their social relations were, as he put it, “taken care of.” Or, more accurately, not taken care of. By the time they arrived on campus, the boys’ experiences had been strikingly different—each distinct from the other’s, and neither in line with the effortless harmony that Leo and Boris liked to advertise for their avid tutees. Look behind the scenes, and the recalcitrant details leap out, especially in—who would have guessed?—Norbert’s and Billy’s less-than-smooth mastery of math. For two singular children, both supersmart but otherwise a study in contrasts, temperaments and family dynamics counted far more than paternal theories or pedagogical tactics ever could. Which didn’t mean that their fathers (and, for Billy, his mother) were marginal. They were crucial, but in ways neither Boris nor Leo began to fathom.

Life in the Wiener household was a whirlwind, despite the best efforts of Leo’s wife, the very proper former Bertha Kahn of Missouri, reared in assimilationist gentility by her businessman father and southern belle mother. Norbert, contrary to his father’s claims, was anything but lazy. An insatiable learner who pored over books early, Nubbins—Norbert’s family nickname—had the freedom, and the inclination, to be as vigorous as he was intellectually curious. He had a model: Leo, a tireless scholar and farmer and mushroom hunter. (Leo had set out from Germany at nineteen on a quest to create a vegetarian utopia in Belize, and when that voyage was aborted, he embarked on a long and circuitous American journey as a jack-of-all-trades—pausing in Kansas City to get semidomesticated by the woman he courted—before his lucky landing at Harvard.)

As a small boy in Cambridge, Norbert eagerly sought out friends. Chunky and full of physical energy, he threw himself into neighborhood games, despite his bad eyesight and coordination—and more fearfulness than he cared to admit. From a young age he especially loved the outdoor “tramps” his father encouraged, and the “element of élan, of triumph, of glorious and effective effort, of drinking deep of life and the emotions thereof” that romantic Leo brought to them. Indoors, the Wieners’ “house of learning” overflowed with visitors, conversation, books, and emotional outbursts. A sister Constance, four years younger, was a baby to quarrel with before she became his beloved companion. Another sister and a brother followed. With a husband whose “shaggy unconformity” and temper she vainly tried to tame, Bertha Wiener had her hands full. That her zealous firstborn was a nub off the old block taxed her further.

By the time Norbert was seven, his father decided it was time for third grade at the local Peabody School in Cambridge. There the stellar reader was bumped up to fourth grade, only to run into math difficulties with a mean teacher. Norbert didn’t know his multiplication tables and didn’t take to rote learning, though he was speeding ahead in math reasoning through avid problem solving with his father. Leo, math-minded himself, pulled him out of school to offer “a greater challenge and stimulus to my imagination,” as Norbert put it in his memoir. There was plenty of that during two more years of home-based learning, much of it outsourced in wonderful ways—a lovely Radcliffe tutor for Latin and German, a chemistry student who helped set up a lab, and endless time in the Agassiz Museum at Harvard, not to mention roaming with friends.

NORBERT WIENER Credit 1

But math studies were another story. His father, whom he praised in his memoir as “a poet at heart, amid the frigid and repressed figures of an uninspiring and decadent Boston,” was also a fierce taskmaster. Norbert’s later bright-eyed photograph didn’t betray the behind-closed-doors reality that had come before. In public, Leo prided himself on setting store by “the blessedness of blundering.” Making children “work out problems” gave them the chance to fumble, and to “acquire that sense of mastery, that joy of triumph, which is of itself an incentive to further effort.” So Leo explained his approach to his biggest journalist fan (whom Norbert later anointed H. “Addlehead” Bruce). In his memoir, Norbert put it rather differently: “No casual interest could satisfy my father’s demand for precise and ready knowledge.” Norbert’s description of algebra lessons with Leo reveal a habit of thundering.

He would begin the discussion in an easy, conversational tone. This lasted exactly until I made the first mathematical mistake. Then the gentle and loving father was replaced by the avenger of the blood. The first warning he gave me of my unconscious delinquency was a very sharp and aspirated “What!” and if I did not follow this by coming to heel at once, he would admonish me, “Now do this again!” By this time I was weeping and terrified. Almost inevitably I persisted in sin, or what was worse, corrected an admissible statement into a blunder. Then the last shreds of my father’s temper were torn, and he addressed me in a phraseology which seemed to me even more violent than it was because I was not aware that it was a free translation from the German.

Leo let loose with brute, ass, fool, donkey. The lessons being blessedly short, sturdy Norbert weathered the tirades. But they “often ended in a family scene. Father was raging, I was weeping, and my mother did her best to defend me”—only to watch Leo later belittle Nubbins in company. Another hurdle his father wasn’t about to publicize, because it suggested just what he denied—a boy under strain—left a more constructive mark: at eight, eye trouble for Norbert necessitated a half-year ban on reading or writing—doctor’s orders. Leo’s orders were to learn by ear. Those months spent working out algebra and geometry problems in his head introduced Norbert to a powerful ally: a highly unrote memory. In the bargain, he staked out a private inner sanctum and discovered his own unusual skill. “I relearned the world,” Norbert later told an MIT colleague. “My mind completely opened up. I could see things I never saw before.”

And then came another “unorthodox experiment,” as Norbert put it in his memoir. His father, now consumed by the herculean challenge of translating twenty-four volumes of Tolstoy in twenty-four months, decided to send his son to high school. The choice hardly seemed auspicious for a nine-year-old, especially a boy newly stranded by the family’s move to the rural Massachusetts town of Harvard. (Leo was in full Tolstoy mode, eager to farm.) But at nearby Ayer High, Norbert lucked into an ideal mentor. More accurately, Miss Laura Leavitt—a classics teacher whom Wiener later described as the “brains and conscience” of the school—was a maternal protector. She eased Norbert into kid-brother status among the students (even letting him sit on her lap at the intimidating start, before he learned “schoolroom behavior”). She made sure he connected with middle schoolers who shared the building. And her nephew became his best friend, just the company Norbert needed after homework recitations with a multitasking Leo, his eyes glued to Tolstoy—his ears alert as ever to any blunders.

Three years later, in the fall of 1906, Norbert graduated from Ayer High, fortified by “a sense of roots and security” (though recently buffeted, he also recalled in his memoir, by a severe case of “calf love”). Now almost twelve, he was a matriculant at Tufts College, in Medford, where the Wieners had moved for that purpose. The idea was to spare him the full glare of the spotlight that would have been his fate on the Harvard campus, which didn’t mean his college debut went unnoticed. He got an upbeat send-off for a prodigy. A Sunday magazine feature in the New York World pronounced Norbert “The Most Remarkable Boy in the World,” heralding his wholesomeness as much as his phenomenal progress. If his speech was a bit “prim and quaint”—“philosophy is a fairyland to me,” he told the reporter—his spirit was judged anything but. Norbert set off daily for campus with his dog at his heels, and he was a hit with the college guys. His eyes, “big and black and blazing [with]…something almost uncanny in their gaze,” conveyed the opposite of fragile precocity.

Billy’s home world was a calm idyll by comparison with the Wiener maelstrom. Officially at least, no family friction intruded on his mathematical awakening, or on anything, for that matter. “The most important thing we agreed on was that we should always agree,” Sarah wrote of the pact she and Boris had made about applying the Sidis approach to their son back at the moon-gazing start. Sarah Mandelbaum herself had missed out on the early learning that was purportedly so crucial. She had spent her childhood tending to siblings, but when she arrived in the United States at thirteen, unschooled, she was undeterred. So was her tutor, seven years her elder, who helped her ace her high school exams by eighteen and married her. By the time their baby was due six years later, her medical degree was behind her. Her focus was now the speedy progress of Boris (for whom clinical work with insane patients at New York’s recently established Pathological Institute was a prelude to his pursuit of yet another Harvard degree, an M.D.)—and of Billy.

Sarah, who later wrote it all up, said she ignored the latest American counsel against too much cuddling and swore by her husband’s principles, applying no fearsome discipline. Not that she was a laid-back mother. She appealed, she emphasized, only to Billy’s desire to please—her, for starters. As Boris had discovered in his role as her tutor-suitor, gratifying Sarah could be arduous but brought lots of plaudits for brilliance. She also imbued Billy with her own Boris-worship, eager to spur him on to efforts to awe his father, whom she described as besotted with his son. And “like all normal little fellows,” Billy loved being “the center of attention,” she claimed, which spurred him to feats of learning. Or did she love making him the center of attention? It was telling that Sarah proudly recounted how a wealthy neighbor in New York used to summon Billy to her apartment to show off for her guests.

At home, Billy at five months was joining his parents for meals, observing and listening to everything, learning to use a spoon by trial and error. Sarah described herself as omnipresent, joining Billy on the floor as she banished all baby talk and made learning a game, from alphabet blocks onward. Ever at hand (the Sidises’ second child, Helena, wasn’t born until a decade later), Sarah was ready to answer or help him research any question. Her account, though, suggested that the partnership was rather one-sided. Billy got swept up in whatever subject was introduced or captured his interest, and early on he let his mother know he could look things up on his own. At around three, he found her old Latin trot, for example. Sarah reported her surprise when one day he excitedly revealed his mastery to his stunned father and some visitors. Boris supplied Billy with calendars to familiarize him with days and numbers. By five, the hyperfocused little boy had figured out by himself how to calculate the day on which any date fell.

But Billy wasn’t simply a convivial bundle of curiosity; nor were his parents the models of progressive insight and flexibility they imagined. Outside the home cocoon, at the Adirondack resort where the Sidises spent summers among academic company during their New York years, the family style made an especially dramatic contrast to the free-range spirit of the philosopher John Dewey’s brood. Sarah watched bemused as the educational reformer’s children ran wild, confirmed in her own vigilance. Not that her son was clamoring to join in the unstructured peer chaos. (Sports held no interest for Billy, Sarah said, because Boris mocked them: so much for William James’s advice about motor activities.) At breakfast, served between eight and nine, Billy threw a fit when food arrived at seven-forty-five, according to the account of another guest who took notes and published them later. He inventoried every guest by his or her room number, and pets by their kennel numbers. Ask him to display his expertise, on that subject or any other, and he was stubbornly unresponsive; betray some bit of ignorance in his presence, and he was encyclopedic.

WILLIAM J. SIDIS Credit 2

When the family moved back to the Boston area so Boris could go to medical school, among Billy’s favorite pastimes was drilling his father on his anatomy studies. “Aha, you forgot the fifth cranial nerve,” his mother would hear him sing out. He also headed off, now six, to a Brookline primary school. There he was an impatient handful for teachers, according to a later press account, covering his ears when he was bored, irrepressible when he was interested. At recess Billy was a loner, avoiding all games and “expounding the nebular hypothesis” to less-than-attentive schoolmates. And he balked at math, even as he zoomed through seven grades in the half year he lasted in school.

At least that was Boris’s story, though Billy’s fascination with calendars and numbers suggests a different struggle at work: a boy absorbed by a rule-bound realm and eager not to be disturbed, and a father determined to prove that his methods could produce more than mere narrow calculating prowess. In any case, Billy’s math resistance gave his father a chance to make targeted use of his pet concept—the psychology of suggestion. Boris began the subtle strategy as homeschooling resumed. After sessions with dominoes and other math games, and staged conversations between Sarah and Boris about the many delights and uses of math, Billy at eight was busy inventing a new logarithmic table. No Leo-style eruptions were entailed—but no soul-bonding excursions transpired either. Mother-son trips to the hilltop behind the house to star-gaze in the evenings were not Billy’s idea of fun. “He soon told me,” Sarah noted, “he could see better and think more clearly when he was alone.”

Before long Billy was back in school—a real gamble, as his parents surely could have anticipated. In retrospect, some have reached for an Asperger’s diagnosis, but no label is, or was, required to appreciate that a loner so woefully lacking in practice with peers was in for trouble. Boris and Sarah may well have cited Norbert’s path as an example when they approached Brookline High about letting Billy, now eight, attend for several hours a day in the fall of 1906: the Wieners had just arrived in Medford, and their high school grad was making headlines at Tufts. But personable young Norbert, who had won over teachers and teenagers in out-of-the-way Ayer High, was not a helpful precedent at all.

A physics teacher at Brookline High showed special interest, but neither nurture nor, it seems, nature had predisposed Billy to endearing behavior. (Even his awed cousins found him odd and unapproachable—and their aunt Sarah domineering and heartless—recalled one of them, the critic and quiz show host Clifton Fadiman.) Billy interrupted the principal’s Bible-reading to declare his atheist opposition. He gave academic help to classmates, who nicknamed him “professor.” Let’s hope some meant it fondly. The same fall of 1906 that Norbert got the “remarkable boy” press treatment at Tufts, Billy’s high school foray elicited notably less favorable gawking in an article headlined “A Phenomenon in Kilts.” Its author had unobtrusively observed the scene as teenagers thundered past the small interloper on the stairs between classes. After making his way to an empty physics lab to finish assembling a clock, Billy began “skipping and dancing about the many-windowed room like a child in his nursery.” The reporter, unsettled rather than charmed, seized on Billy’s gaze as confirmation of dire prodigy lore: “There is something weird and ‘intense’ in his gray eye, and the way he looks out under his eyebrows.”

· 4 ·

Might everything have turned out differently—for both boys, but especially Billy—had the Sidises taken their cue from the Wieners’ post-high-school decision to shield Norbert from the Harvard limelight? It’s tempting to wonder. Instead, the Sidises aimed to pick up the pace. When Billy was only nine (he had soon left Brookline High and then sped through calculus and read Einstein on his own), they were already pressing for admission to Harvard. The thought of engaging high-powered tutors (Boris’s former line of work, after all) apparently never occurred to them. Possibly their motives were ones that latter-day meritocrats would recognize: to give their son an edge in the superchild spectacle, and his father’s reputation a boost. Doubtless Sarah was impatient to see Billy—who so revered and resembled Boris, she constantly said—become another brilliant outlier welcomed into the most prestigious ivory tower. (“Our undisciplinables,” William James once announced at a Harvard commencement dinner, “are our proudest product.”) How Billy viewed the plan, particularly after his misfit experiences in the Brookline schools, nobody evidently felt the need to ask. What the inevitable campus hoopla would be like, the Sidises either didn’t consider or didn’t care—though in theory, of course, Billy wasn’t supposed to become self-conscious about his specialness. Their nephew Clifton Fadiman later brutally diagnosed Boris and Sarah as lacking in “wisdom, even any common sense. They were, except intellectually, fools.”

Social obtuseness seemed to be Billy’s style, too, which was a blessing of sorts, at least at the outset, when Harvard, overcoming its qualms about his lack of maturity, admitted him at eleven. The boy who had happily skipped around the Brookline High lab displayed a frisky imperviousness in Cambridge, too. “I was certainly no model of the social graces,” Norbert wrote of his sightings of William, “but it was clear to me that no other child of his age would have gone down Brattle Street wildly swinging a pigskin bag, without either order or cleanliness. He was an infant with a full share of the infractuosities of a grown-up Dr. Johnson.” William gave no sign of being fazed that he didn’t fit into a world of polished young gentlemen. Nor had awed adulation (and a rash of newspaper coverage) gone to his head, a big Sunday magazine profile in the fall was pleased to report. William was “utterly without self-conceit, but still with a broad grin for the humor of the situation: ‘It’s very strange,’ he remarked in his high, clear voice, ‘but you know, I was born on April Fool’s Day!’ ” A mind busy with vector analysis—he was enrolled in only one class the first term, advanced math—could tune out the fuss and the awkwardness.

But of course the purpose of William’s being at Harvard wasn’t to remain off in his own orbit. And in fact, Sarah had seen to it that he had been hearing about his unusual feats for years. Whether or not William much liked it, she had made performing and pontificating a habit. Mixed in with his cluelessness was what could be taken for arrogance—and certainly was in his parents’ case. Their message, after all, not so subtly implied that those who didn’t match the Sidises’ pedagogical success (which was everybody) were mere slackers. Under the circumstances, the idea that Billy would deliver a lecture to the Mathematical Club in January 1910—an event arranged by a Harvard math professor whose father, a retired faculty member, was a family friend of the Sidises—was as loaded as it was alluring. Not least, another round in an ever more intense spotlight was guaranteed. Now the stakes had been raised, inviting stark questions no child should have to face and the public can rarely resist: Was he keeping up the pace, on the way to becoming a creative genius? Or was he a victim of parental ambition, headed for failure?

The substance of William’s talk was impressively incomprehensible: that was the gist of accounts by reporters inclined to suggest that what was over their heads was beyond the rest of the audience, too. One informed listener was Norbert, who found the discussion original in the sense that William had consulted no sources in formulating a notably full account of the fourth dimension—a real achievement for anyone, never mind an eleven-year-old. It was William’s style that entertained the press. He had his professorial act down—introductory patter, gestures, arcane vocabulary, diagrams, even a closing glance at his watch. Not least, he was impatiently supercilious with the assembled professorial elite. Rapidly recapping a point for one questioner, William inquired, “Is that any plainer now?”

The retired Harvard professor whose son had arranged the talk was on the alert for trouble, socially attuned as his old friend Boris clearly was not. At Harvard, if anywhere, “such a mind should find its home,” the professor wrote of William in a letter to the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, worried that the boy was becoming a mere freakish spectacle. The university, he urged, should “do its best for the preservation and protection of that new type.” William was a potential guiding light, not merely another phenomenal calculator. The Mathematical Club got a chance to make the comparison with another performer, a month after William’s talk, when “Marvelous Griffith,” a farmer, displayed his prowess in the same Sever Hall. Young Sidis probed concepts, but Griffith’s “system depended too much on his own inherent genius for mathematics to be of any general service in their instruction system,” a faculty member concluded.

But by then, William had stirred a press backlash that revived an old-style type of prodigy—an exploited specimen, enfeebled by ill-advised precocity. On January 27, 1910, a front-page article in The New York Times reported that young William had been “weakened recently by overstudy” and had been felled by a cold after his lecture. A longer account inside the paper diagnosed a “breakdown” and blamed Boris. To say that Dr. Sidis’s “new and better system of education” had backfired, the Times duly noted, might be premature. But he had unquestionably failed to shield his sensitive son from “the morbid excitements and excessive attention to which he probably has been subjected” due to his feats, and which could be fatal. The article was a particularly unsavory instance of just such voyeurism, an irony that went unnoticed. It was also based on false rumors.

Yet the story—in spirit, though not fact—was accurate. William, under stress, had been stranded. In addition to being fools, Clifton Fadiman judged in retrospect, his aunt and uncle, “though not cruel, had no truly paternal or maternal feeling: they could educate a child but not rear him, which is a different thing.” For William, happy when he could focus on his own interests, the Boris-emulation ceaselessly promoted by his mother seems to have been what passed for emotional intimacy in the household. Warmly insightful empathy, at any rate, wasn’t a family strong suit. William had in fact caught a cold after his talk. Though he apparently didn’t suffer a collapse of any sort, he did stay home for some time. But solicitous stocktaking wasn’t on the agenda.

Boris was in the throes of opening a sanatorium for “nervous patients” up the coast in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on an estate bequeathed to him by a wealthy benefactress. If the innuendoes had been truer—and the young genius had gotten at least a dose of concerned expert attention—perhaps William would have benefited. Boris’s announced specialty, curing “persons who are hobby ridden,” was at least pertinent. William, who hadn’t let classwork eclipse his various independent projects (he devised, for example, an elaborate constitution for a utopia he called Hesperia), had developed an obsession with trolley transfers. But Boris had new patients to worry about, and in any case, parental protective gestures, such as they were, tended to irk William. Sarah had made a point of taking the streetcar with him to and from Cambridge during the fall—never mind that he’d learned all about Boston’s growing public transportation system and yearned for a solitary commute between Harvard clamor and home. Now Sarah, with young Helena to tend to, was about to take on the management of the sanatorium as well. Like Boris, she had her hands full.

William was on his own as he entered adolescence, and more of an outsider than ever on campus. Under suspicion now of being mentally unbalanced, he was prey to continued press hounding. An article noted that when he found his math class tedious, William indulged in distracting antics like twirling his hat despite requests that he stop. His lack of social awareness, no longer a shield, left him painfully exposed. With the family’s New Hampshire move, the plan was for him to try Harvard dorm life. But he was at sea with fellow students, the dupe of pranks that mostly turned on his awkward ignorance about girls. Bullying soon drove him to a rooming house on Brattle Street. There, approaching thirteen and not exactly practical, William had to cope alone all week—though at least he was spared a mother whose aggressive nagging had intensified under the stress of her added burdens at the Sidis Psychopathic Institute.

Meanwhile, Boris, evidently feeling beleaguered too, erupted as a public scold, precisely the kind of parent no prodigy needs. In June 1911, Boris’s “Philistine and Genius” lecture appeared in updated form as a short book in which he pulled no punches. Extolling his remarkable son (though not by name), he excoriated a “drift into national degeneracy” and warned that war was imminent. Sidis was “bent on repelling, offending, and estranging,” remarked one reviewer. It was the screed of a man who had concluded that his message about America’s backward approach to education wasn’t getting across after all. “Poor old college owls, academic barn-yard-fowls and worn-out sickly school-bats” was just one litany of derision. Boris never paused to consider who would pay the price for his venom. Decades later Sarah recognized that her husband had “pulled down upon his stout head, and upon Billy who was so very young—the anger that comes from hurt pride. Educators, psychologists, editorial writers and newspaper readers were furious with him. And their fury was a factor in Billy’s life upon which we had not counted.”

What she didn’t say, or see, was that Boris had also bequeathed plenty of his own fury directly to his son, which wasn’t part of the Sidis theory. That William was already feeling fiercely embattled became clear when, his college career at an end, the press cornered him once again. He graduated cum laude at sixteen in June 1914, with a wide array of courses (and a batch of Cs in junior year) under his belt. The Boston Herald was ready with salutes to his record-breaking prowess. He was “mentally…regarded by wise men as the most remarkable youth in the world” and was on his way to becoming “the youngest college professor in the world,” with an appointment to teach math at Rice Institute. As for William’s own thoughts about the path ahead, or about his Harvard ordeals, he at first seemed wisely determined to keep them to himself. He offered this brusque—or perhaps anxious—brush-off to the hovering reporters he hated: “I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion. I have always hated crowds.”

But William wasn’t going to get away so easily. What were his one-of-a-kind plans for his personal, never mind intellectual, future? Such an inquiry promised ideal grist for the press. It was also the stuff of adolescent crisis for William, who got sucked in by an insinuating reporter. He needed to talk, and the Boston Herald was ready to listen. The picture that accompanied the two-page spread showed a filled-out young man in a suit, complete with a small daisy tie-pin, looking very mature for his age. It was William’s graduation photo, in which he offered a reserved smile and a warm gaze. Two sidebars excerpted temperate statements of Boris’s core educational tenets. But the headline brimmed with mockery: “HARVARD’S BOY PRODIGY VOWS NEVER TO MARRY Sidis Pledges Celibacy Beneath Sturdy Oak, Has 154 Rules Which Govern His Life, ‘Women Do Not Appeal to Me,’ He Says; He Is 16.”

William even let the reporter into his Brattle Street rooms. The interview began in the vein of a therapy session in which a patient describes dire pain while deep in denial of just that. With odd pride, William laid out his obsessive-compulsive rituals for steering clear of women, though he also seemed half-aware of how peculiarly self-entrapping they might appear. “Many of my rules are checks rather than hard and fast laws,” he explained. “They act as safety valves.” It sounded like advice from Boris-the-hobby-expert on keeping compulsions within bounds. But rules for tempering rigidly rule-based thinking are easier to cite than to apply, especially for a teenager faced with a huge transition.

Readers didn’t need to know the family drama to detect an alienated son, though William was working hard to keep his fury under wraps. He was caught up in his own version of the struggle for balance and meaning that had sent a twenty-year-old John Stuart Mill into a depression. Where Mill, fearing he was merely a “manufactured man,” recognized a desperate need to reconnect with his feelings, a younger William grasped at equilibrium by denying them: “I had made up my mind that sentiment would make too much of an upset in my life,” he told the Herald reporter. It wasn’t just romance and sex but anger that he needed to keep at bay—anger that ran in the family. “I have a quick temper; ergo, I will not mingle a great deal with the fellows around me, then I shall not have occasion to lose my temper.”

But the anger he barely suppressed seemed to be aimed above all at his parents. Without directly addressing his own past, he indicted the family as a prison for the young. William declared himself “not at all a believer in home life” or in “forcing children in the early stages of their education.” In one puzzling and poignant swipe, he all but abolished childhood: “No one should be dependent upon the good-will of others for support when too young to support himself.” He announced that he was “in a way…a Socialist,” perhaps not such a surprising allegiance for a prodigy who was feeling sabotaged by filial dependence, Harvard snobbery, and media prurience—and loneliness. His goal, he announced as he informed his interviewer that his earlier interest in the fourth dimension had entirely faded, was to “seek happiness in my own way.”

· 5 ·

When Norbert arrived at Harvard at fourteen, he quickly figured out that William wasn’t going to be a companion. But the unkempt boy swinging his pigskin bag seems to have inspired a fraught sense of fellowship in Norbert, who began his graduate studies in zoology already battling feelings of deep inadequacy, ostracism, and, worst of all, ill-fatedness. He did more than worry about William, who as the youngest oddity on campus was a magnet for the unwelcome glare that Norbert knew he was lucky to be mostly spared. (He knew better how to elude it, too, sometimes even fleeing down Cambridge alleyways to avoid reporters.) William was also a figure with whom he could readily identify—and wished he couldn’t. Norbert came to Harvard newly, and intensely, haunted by predictions of failure for a “freak of nature,” or nurture, of the sort the two of them were.

He had spent the summer of 1909 in acute crisis after three years at Tufts. He had thrived there on the academic challenges, but four decades later in his memoir he described feeling off-balance, and not just in the lab, where he was hopelessly clumsy. Majoring in math while eagerly exploring biology and philosophy, he was “nearly completely a man for purposes of study.” Heading home each day to siblings and neighborhood buddies, he was “wholly a child for purposes of companionship.” Wherever he was, hormones left him feeling guilty and confused. And his father consistently kept him in his place. Leo, unlike the Sidises, zealously practiced what he preached about the dangers of singling a boy out for his brilliance—yet failed to consider the risks of eroding youthful confidence. His “Donkey!” explosions were bad. Perhaps worse was his refrain, in company and in the press, that Norbert was not just average but lazy. Leo surely didn’t believe it, especially once he had initiated his two bright daughters and younger son into his regimen, only to discover that they failed to make anything like Norbert’s progress—and were thoroughly intimidated. Still, Leo didn’t let up, even in his son’s presence.

As the end of Norbert’s time at Tufts approached, he was an exhausted teenager with “severely lacerated self-esteem” who found himself preoccupied with death—calculating how many years he and everyone he knew might have left, and what he might accomplish. Self-doubt swamped him when he didn’t make Phi Beta Kappa and learned that the reason was “doubt as to whether the future of an infant prodigy would justify the honor.” Such a view stunned him. Votes of no confidence now seemed to be closing in. As the “prodigy comes to realize that the elders of the community are suspicious of him,” Norbert wrote later, “he begins to fear reflections of this suspicion in the attitude of his contemporaries.” He slipped into a real depression over the summer, with a lingering low fever and no sense of his future.

By the time Norbert started at Harvard, he was armed with social awareness that he saw poor William could have used—but it brought a burden, too: acute self-consciousness about his status as a misfit in a setting where, as he put it in his memoir, “a gentlemanly indifference, a studious coldness, an intellectual imperturbability joined with the graces of society [to make] the ideal Harvard man.” In a maladroit hurry in the lab (he shifted from zoology to biology), Norbert was always breaking glass and messing up procedures, to his embarrassment. He later remembered his chagrin when some classmates bought him a watch: he’d had no idea he was bothering them by constantly asking for the time. Norbert went ahead and threw himself, as he always had, into more than his studies. He dared to join in pick-up basketball games in the gym basement but quickly realized his glasses couldn’t take the rough games even if he could. A commuter, he mingled happily in the library of the Harvard Union between classes. That was where the intellectual, unclubbable sort hung out—generating murmurs of disapproval as anti-Semitism became more overt under President Lowell. Norbert’s mother had primly disparaged Jews throughout his childhood, and somehow the topic of the family’s own heritage never arose in the household. Now she urged him to spend less time in the Union. Norbert, who allied himself with his father in boldly pursuing truth and overcoming bigotry, was distressed.

Leo meanwhile had decided he wasn’t particularly pleased with his son’s prospects in biology, so in the fall of 1910 he dispatched Norbert to Cornell on a scholarship to study philosophy, for which he had shown talent as a preteen at Tufts. Compared to William, whose parents sought out exposure and skimped on support, Norbert had a fiercely protective guide in coping with what now goes by the term multipotentiality—high abilities pointing in a confusing array of directions. Still, Leo’s bossy approach to the blundering was hard on Norbert, who welcomed some distance from the man who was hero and taskmaster in one. Nearly sixteen, he stumbled into what turned out to be a “black year of my life.” He faced a daunting endeavor his father did not direct: a struggle to claim an identity and the feelings of agency that go with it—just what prodigious children appear to have early but soon enough discover they need urgently. William was at a similar crossroads as he, also sixteen, left Harvard four years later.

The day his father dropped him off at his boardinghouse at Cornell, Norbert glimpsed just how disorienting his quest for perspective on himself was going to be. The two of them paid a visit to an old friend of Leo’s, a professor of ethics, who had agreed to keep an eye on Norbert during the year. In the course of conversation, the rumor that Maimonides was an ancestor of the Wieners somehow cropped up. Norbert promptly went off to investigate this unfamiliar philosopher who seemed to be a relative, only to be shocked to discover that the great Aristotelian had headed the Jewish community of Egypt. The implication hit him: his family was Jewish. Norbert gazed in the mirror at features he could now recognize as Semitic. He looked at his beloved sister’s photograph and saw she wasn’t just a pretty girl, but a pretty Jewish girl.

And suddenly his parents were exposed not just as social pariahs—if he was to credit the genteelly anti-Semitic Bertha Wiener’s views—but as, in essence, liars. Norbert found it next to impossible to forgive his mother’s prejudice; he went on to explore her forebears and realized that her maiden name, Kahn, was in fact Cohen. He struggled to excuse his assimilationist father, who had always conveyed respect for Jews; Norbert decided he must have wanted to spare his children the “consciousness of belonging to an undervalued group.” Norbert never mentioned what must have been the other revelation: he and William were now joined as double outliers.

He was miserable, he wrote in his memoir. A “confused mass of feelings of resentment, despair, and rejection” overwhelmed him. Just coping day to day felt like more than he could manage. For the first time, Norbert didn’t have his mother to hound him about cleanliness and his father to enforce disciplined study. He floundered in his one math course, and his philosophy papers were so crabbed that he was asked if German was his first language. In his letters home, Norbert staged no confrontation, betrayed no collapse. He kept saying things were “OK” and duly reported on his finances, which he had never handled on his own before. “My only want is some boy companion, but boys are scarce hereabouts,” he wrote his mother, and in a postscript asked his favorite sister, Constance, for news of “W.J.S.” (William) and the Berle children, and his non-Harvard friends.

But Norbert also began staking out new ground with his father as he wrote home. Leo, conscious of his status as a brilliant but marginal figure in his Slavic field, had often hashed out philological points in his son’s company. Now Norbert, struggling with his deepening sense of himself as an outlier, seemed to be pushing his father to be a bolder model. If he could see him not as an oppressive Pygmalion but as part of a tradition of unconventional thinkers that reached back to Maimonides, perhaps he could banish his own fearful expectations: Norbert didn’t put it this way, yet finding sustenance in social solidarity—not just looking for it within—had always been his instinct. Deeply confused, he never contemplated embracing the Jewish faith, but here was a broader context for his own prodigyhood. As he later noted of the Sidises, the emphasis on honing rabbinic learnedness in every generation was still fresh in Jewish émigrés. Perhaps Maimonides, a Jew steeped in Muslim tradition who left his mark on Western philosophy, offered a cosmopolitan ideal: a bold and resilient outsider receptive to new ideas from exotic sources.

Amid his Cornell woes, Norbert kept up with his father’s linguistic studies. He raised questions (“What is the Egyptian word for goose?”) and weighed in on Leo’s theories, one of which had lately been challenged by a scholar. “Give it to him!” Norbert urged, eager for “a good philological fight.” Here was a son/student trying to turn the tables. It was “devastating,” Norbert wrote later, to learn that Leo had spread the notion “that my failures were my own but my successes were my father’s.” Still, he wanted Leo to be an undaunted success himself. His mother was always urging her bristly menfolk to fit in—which, given what he now knew, perhaps made Norbert bridle more at her conformism. He seemed to be pushing for a combative, productive example as he foundered. Norbert wasn’t failing by any means, but a professor had informed him that his work wasn’t what had been expected—hardly the verdict a boy worried about fading promise needed. Nor was the news, as the term ended, that his fellowship wouldn’t be renewed. “How is your work?” he wrote his father in May, underscoring four times the demand that followed. “I want more concrete news!!!!!!!!”

For Jews, the way ahead was all uphill, which could serve as a kind of relief: it was an alternative to the downward flameout augured for a prodigy. An avid hiker like his father, Norbert knew the terrain. In fact, for Norbert, the steeper the path the better, to judge by drawings he sent as postscripts to his sister Constance in his letters from Ithaca. His pen and ink efforts showed the two of them heading nearly vertically up Mount Washington’s Boott Spur trail, and not falling off. Norbert’s fears and depression had fueled a sense of himself as “nervous” in temperament. But he also set great store by the stamina that had allowed him to weather Leo’s treatment.

The sense of “filial servitude” lingered as Norbert finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in June 1913, writing a dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. But now eighteen, he was on the brink of a much broader apprenticeship, with plenty of detours in it. As Norbert doubtless appreciated, his father was in no position to demand that he keep up the dizzying pace of superachievement. Indeed, Leo now emphasized to the press that there was no hurry. His son—“he is so young, only eighteen”—had “plenty of time….He has not begun to specialize yet” and would probably be heading abroad.

Leo himself, having set sail for America in 1882 at nineteen, was over thirty by the time he settled into his life and work. He had never regretted his picaresque journey from New Orleans to Kansas City, picking up odd jobs and curious acquaintances—and yet more languages (including Gaelic!). “Just Missed Becoming a Great Merchant,” read the headline of a profile of Wiener Sr. in The Boston Daily Globe in 1914, which went on to note, “Passion for Languages Finally Fitted Him Into His Life Work.” Fortuitous swerves plus zealous focus: for anybody heading into young adulthood, not merely a former prodigy, counting on both is to be recommended—but not, Norbert and William discovered, as anything like a surefire formula for success.

· 6 ·

As Norbert and William navigated their way amid wartime uneasiness, what made the difference was temperament, social circumstances, and luck, as much as paternal guidance or neglect—not that the factors could be readily disentangled, and not that their fathers ceased to be important. For William, a resolve to sabotage Boris’s enterprise unfolded not just tragically but ironically. In his effort to escape the public attention and expectations thrust upon him, he turned his back on achieving recognized greatness—only to end up very much his father’s son, feeling isolated and besieged. Further exposure to academia didn’t go well. As a seventeen-year-old math teacher at Rice, William was yet again mercilessly teased by undergraduates older than he was. Enrolled after that at Harvard Law School, he dropped out in his third year, not the collector of credentials his father had been. If his growing interest in radical politics encouraged any new bonding with Boris (the erstwhile tutor of Russian serfs), a bitter break with his parents was in store after William got arrested at a Boston May Day Socialist march in 1919 that dissolved into mayhem.

By now twenty-one, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison on charges of rioting and assaulting a police officer, though he had done neither. In William’s later version of events, his actual fate was worse. Before he could appeal the initial sentence, he was “kidnapped” by his parents and forcibly kept in the New Hampshire sanatorium for a year, after which they whisked him to California—eager to keep him not just out of court and prison but also out of touch with fellow Socialists in Boston. (Among them was an unrequited romantic interest: Martha Foley, who had marched alongside him and who went on to found Story magazine—a friend he courted ardently but without success.) Upon finally escaping to New York and low-level accounting work, he was spooked, in flight from his parents’ “protection,” press attention, his reputation (he promptly quit if officemates learned who he was), the legal charges. In 1923, when Boris died at fifty-six of a cerebral hemorrhage, William didn’t go to the funeral. But he did write to a Harvard Law School faculty member, eager to discover whether his case had been dropped. William got good news, though he was shielded from learning the grounds for the dismissal of charges: Sarah had testified that her son was “mentally abnormal.” Already determined to avoid his mother at all costs, William hardly needed to find that out in order to hate her, as he often said he did.

William’s sister, Helena, kept in fond touch—grateful for her big brother’s tutorial efforts as she grew up (their parents having decided she was too fragile for more than haphazard schooling) and gratified that he counted on her common sense. Not that her advice to try more challenging jobs made a dent. “I just want to work an adding machine, so I won’t have to use my mind on it,” he told her. “I want to use my mind for other things.” William, though mostly phobic about math, was as eclectic as ever in seeking happiness in his own intense and now anonymous way.

Writing under pseudonyms, he pursued a wide array of topics: the collection of streetcar transfers, the contributions various Indian tribes had made to American colonists’ notions of democracy, collisions on highways, trivia about his beloved city of Boston (for a magazine called What’s New in Town), and more. He put his name on his most ambitious endeavor, The Animate and the Inanimate, which was published (perhaps at his own expense) in 1925 to no notice. It set forth his ideas about the possible reversibility of the second law of thermodynamics, and was later judged by some—among them, Buckminster Fuller—to have anticipated versions of the big bang theory and black holes.

Be careful what you wish for seemed to be William’s belated message for Boris, who had never cared about conventional success or money and had fiercely championed the antiphilistine generalist. Not unlike his aggrieved father, William finally did erupt publicly, devastated by a reprise of the exposure that had begun with Boris and Sarah. In 1937, he was dragged back into the limelight in a cruelly patronizing New Yorker profile in the magazine’s “Where Are They Now?” series. It was written by James Thurber (under a pseudonym) and bore the title “April Fool!” Worse than a portrait of a burned-out recluse, the piece mercilessly mocked William’s still very busy mind. He broke his vow of seclusion to sue for invasion of privacy and malicious libel. The judge dismissed the case, which has become a classic in privacy law, and William, who worked on the briefs, lost the appeal. Once a public figure, always a public figure, the judge ruled, even as he lamented the ruthless intrusion. Once Boris Sidis’s son, always Boris Sidis’s son: that thought follows not far behind. William persisted with his various causes, especially active in defense of pacifism and of limited government, alienating allies again and again with his bullheadedness. In 1944, at forty-six, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Norbert, who vented his outrage at the New Yorker article in his memoir, risked sounding harsh in his assessment of William (by then dead): a “defeated—and honorably defeated—combatant in the battle for existence.” As for himself, Norbert’s verdict was stringent, too—that he was a near casualty, still struggling. In contrast to William, already at odds with his ill-attuned parents as he graduated from Harvard, Norbert left Cambridge with the opposite problem: a revered father who still couldn’t resist butting in, even if he was no longer bossing in the old way.

For Norbert, unable to overtly rebel against his hero, traveling a path beyond Leo’s ken proved crucial. Norbert surged onward academically, though not exactly smoothly. He won a prestigious Harvard postgraduate traveling fellowship and headed off to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, with Bertrand Russell, who had been assured (by Leo) that a sturdy specimen was on his way: “physically strong (weighing 170 lbs.), perfectly balanced morally and mentally, and shows no traits generally associated with early precocity. I mention all this to you that you may not assume that you are to deal with an exceptional or freakish boy, but with a normal student whose energies have not been misdirected.”

But Leo, of course, couldn’t guarantee good chemistry between them. Russell proved to be a ruthless mentor, and a homesick Norbert sent an unvarnished account to his father. Russell complained that Norbert’s views were a “horrible fog,” his exposition of them worse, and accused him of “too much confidence and cock-sureness.” Norbert had heard a lot worse in his day, and though wounded, he was hardly undone. Russell, he complained in turn, was “an iceberg. His mind impresses me as a keen, cold, narrow logical machine, that cuts the universe into neat little packets, that measure, as it were, just three inches each way.” His own mind, Norbert was discovering, was fertile—and more versatile in math than he had known. When things didn’t click the way they did in the brilliant G. H. Hardy’s math class at Cambridge, bearing down brought results. He was able to show dubious professors (and himself) that he could keep up with the rest of the class and feel gratified by his progress.

Norbert, not his father, was now maturely trying to decide where his real interests lay—in philosophy or math, perhaps applied math—and he was finding his place in a world of donnish collegiality and intense discussions. At the same time, he could sound like the college-age youth—or the still-precarious postprodigy—that he was. He harped on his work habits in his letters home, now assuring his parents that he had his nose to the grindstone, then assuring them that he wasn’t overtaxing himself. He was searching for the discipline he had depended on his father to provide, and complying as best he could with Leo’s counsel: “Do not work too hard, but do not become lazy at the same time.” (“I have occasionally taken a glass of beer, as no other cheap liquid refreshment is available,” Norbert informed his parents, itemizing the amount and costs. “If you object to my doing as I have done, I shall not take any more.”)

If Norbert was “loafing,” as he admitted he was as the summer of 1914 arrived, he was pretty sure he wasn’t “idling.” The young man who had known depression recognized the importance of rest. He needed to fend off the feeling that his studies were “a dead drag” and to restore his “enthusiasm over my work.” It was very gratifying to have his father proudly salute several of his published projects as “fine, especially fine, since I do not understand a word in them.” Still, Norbert felt more under Leo’s thumb than he wanted to be when he returned to the United States in 1915 to figure out what he might do next. Now twenty-one, he began jumping among jobs (some lined up by Leo), happier the farther away he was from home. “It may seem a step down to follow years of precocity and early academic degrees by the somewhat routine tasks of a shopworker, a hackwriter, a computer, and a journalist,” Norbert noted in his memoir, but real-world immersion held glamour. His stint in 1918 at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground—he was summoned thanks to his mathematical talents, not paternal contacts—was especially rewarding. Mood swings continued. Yet busy doing invaluable work on antiaircraft targeting with fellow mathematicians, he found the camaraderie and independence he yearned for.

And soon, in a now-flourishing postwar academic market for the brainiacs needed in a science-guided era, Norbert found his niche. At MIT, down the road from increasingly anti-Semitic Harvard, social graces and pedigrees didn’t count for much, and wartime technical experience like his did. He got hired. The latest mathematical tools were much in demand as electronic communication technology took off in the 1920s. By then he was seeing the woman he finally married in 1926 and with whom he had two daughters. Norbert was also deep into the prescient endeavor of fathoming the endlessly elusive process at the heart of the computer age: the flow of information.

Cybernetics, “or control and communication in the animal and the machine,” as Norbert summed up his new pursuit, has been hailed as the catalyst of the first genuinely American scientific revolution. A notably hybrid undertaking, it was at once theoretical and practical, concerned with both mind and matter. Cybernetics laid crucial groundwork for modern automation and is back in the spotlight with recent cross-disciplinary developments in robotics, prosthetics, synthetic biology, and more. It “sired, inspired, or contributed to dozens of new technical and scientific fields,” Wiener’s biographers write, “from artificial intelligence and cognitive science to environmental science and modern economic theory.” That a pioneering modern prodigy had sired it seems particularly fitting. Norbert’s work helped usher in the computer, which one of his many successors, Seymour Papert, heralded as “the children’s machine” and the key to a newly youth-driven “age of learning.”

Norbert, who died in 1964, surely would have been excited. But in a memoir haunted by the depression he suffered on and off throughout his life, he aimed to remind readers of the human challenges of growing up. Every child, however extraordinary his mastery of a skill may be, “struggles in a half-understood world” of adults as he strives for autonomy. William Sidis probably wasn’t far from his mind, nor was his own imposing father, when Norbert distilled a low-tech secret of success. Based on his experience, he concluded that the key wasn’t expert early tutelage, grateful though he said he was for the “rigorous discipline and training” he received (if “perhaps in rather excessive portions”). What counted most for a boy like him, he wrote in an article that he hoped might help others, was more modest: the hard-won “chance to develop a reasonably thick skin against the pressures which will certainly be made on him and a confidence that somewhere in the world he has his own function which he may reasonably hope to fulfill.”