Good Will Hunting at 20: the tragic genius whose life mirrored the film While studying at Harvard, Matt Damon wrote the first act of a play for a screenwriting class. It featured a tenaciously […]

While studying at Harvard, Matt Damon wrote the first act of a play for a screenwriting class. It featured a tenaciously talented genius with a knack for solving demanding maths problems.

Though blessed with unrivalled talents, the central character was damaged and volatile, subject to bouts of anger and harbouring a mistrust for authority figures.

Certain he would be flunked for producing an incomplete piece of work, Damon was nonetheless awarded an A.

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The screenplay would be developed into 1997 movie Good Will Hunting. An uplifting modern classic that earned Damon, along with Ben Affleck, a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Damon has never cited an inspiration for Will Hunting. But it’s extraordinary how many connections there are to the life of fellow Harvard alumnus Will Sidis.

Twenty years on from the film’s release, who was the real tortured genius whose life bore uncanny similarities?

Good Will Sidis

Born in 1898, a century before Damon’s Oscar triumph, Will Sidis didn’t wait long to make his impression on the world.

By his second birthday Sidis could reportedly read the New York Times.

By the time he turned eight, he had allegedly taught himself to speak eight languages – including Latin, Russian and Hebrew. He had also developed his own language, named Vendergood.

Sidis’s natural linguistic ability was rivalled, however, by his understanding of higher mathematics.

At the age of nine, Tufts College accepted the gifted mathematician, where he reportedly spent his time correcting mistakes in textbooks and combing Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity for errors.

Aged 11, Sidis set a record for becoming the youngest person to enrol at Harvard University and in the same year delivered a presentation on four-dimensional bodies to the Harvard Mathematics Club.

By the time he was 17, Sidis was teaching three mathematics classes at William Marsh Rice Institute for the Advancement of Letters, Science, and Art.

Though never confirmed, some experts have claimed that Sidis’s IQ score was between 250 and 300.

According to mathematician and lecturer James Grime, Sidis, like the fictional Will Hunting, was “predicted to become a great mathematician”.

Criminalised and marginalised

However, Sidis refused to follow the path that had been painstakingly paved for him by his parents.

The polymath had grown tired of the growing expectations of how he should live, and the bullying he suffered at various institutions where he taught.

In 1919, Sidis – who was in the process of developing his own Libertarian philosophy following a short-lived stint at Harvard Law School – was arrested for his participation in a communist demonstration.

Grime notes that, “like Hunting, Sidis defended himself [at his trial].

“This did not go well, and Sidis was sentenced to 18 months jail — six months for rioting and a year for assaulting an officer.”

Hunting, film fans may remember, was locked up for assaulting a cop.

And Sidis, like Hunting, was also offered a second chance.

His parole, according to Grime, involved dedicating his time to work at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and seeing a psychologist.

Unlike Hunting, unfortunately, the psychologist he was required to see was his demanding father – rather than an avuncular Robin Williams.

An abused individual

For a year Sidis lived in his father’s asylum, which he described as “mental torture”.

Sidis may have had a far different upbringing to Damon’s character, in terms of wealth and class. But it may have been similarly abusive.

“I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is to live it in seclusion”

Since his birth, Sidis felt he had been treated like a science experiment by his parents, who pushed his precocious talent to the limits.

In his paper Railroading the Past, written in 1939, Sidis reveals that he was “kept under various kinds of mental torture, consisting of being scolded and nagged at for an average of six to eight hours a day”.

Sometimes this scolding was administered while he was “loaded with sleeping medicine”.

‘The perfect life’

Years before his imprisonment, a 16-year-old Sidis spoke to a group of reporters following his graduation from Harvard.

The man, or rather boy, with the world at his feet talked of his dream of living “a perfect life”.

“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.”

In 1921, Sidis got his wish when he escaped the clutches of his demanding parents.

Like Damon’s Will Hunting, he now rejected other people’s expectations of him and his talents.

Grime notes: “[Sidis ] spent the remainder of his life working menial clerical jobs [similar to Damon’s janitor], working adding machines, and writing about Native American history.”

Southie boy

According to a New Yorker article published in 1937, a reclusive Sidis was quoted to have said “the very sight of a mathematical formula makes me physically ill”. Sidis refuted the claim, but the gifted intellectual’s hunger for maths appeared non-existent in his later life.

Instead, Sidis occupied himself with collecting streetcar (tram) tickets, coining the term peridromophile for those who shared his passion.

In 1944 the former “boy genius” who had the world at his feet suffered a cerebral haemorrhage.

He died alone in South Boston, known affectionately by locals as “Southie”. The very same place Will Hunting himself called home.

Good Will Hunting is available to watch on Netflix UK