William James Sidis

Born in 1898 to a psychiatrist father and physician mother, William James Sidis showed extraordinary intellectual capability from infancy. He entered Harvard at eleven and graduated cum laude at sixteen, but the publicity that followed his teenage lecture on four-dimensional geometry became a burden he would spend his adult life trying to escape. Imprisoned during the First Red Scare, he withdrew entirely from public view and worked anonymous jobs while writing extensively under pseudonyms - on cosmology, mathematics, Native American history, urban transit systems. When The New Yorker tracked him down in the 1930s, his unsuccessful privacy lawsuit set precedents that outlasted his reputation. He died in 1944 at forty-six, having turned his formidable intellect toward obscurity as deliberately as he'd once been steered toward fame.