My academic growth can be summed up as:

• The early (pre-school) years: I had the huge luck of being landed in an environment supportive of my curiosity and knowledge thirst. Particular highlights are:
  • My child care center (female) director bringing me to classical music concerts. I subsequently failed to develop a taste for the noise favoured by my classmates over my pre-teen and teen years.
  • My family responding favourably to my demands that I be taught to read from an early age; I tentatively date the achievement of adequate reading literacy (but not the motor skills for writing) to the age of four years. I particularly remember my (first?) reading lesson with my aunt Marie-Laure, but others probably were significantly involved in the process.

    Subsequently, and throughout my life, family, neighbours, friends of the family or of my mother, ensured a flow of educational and fascinating reading material over a wide array of subjects. This was not always intentional; some adults, having heard I enjoyed “reading” brought me to a book shop to select a gift, expecting me to select a (relatively cheap) comics or adventure/novel book, being surprised by my choice of an encyclopedia or similar writings, which usually were more expensive. (This doesn't mean I didn't extensively enjoy comics and novels - and still do. American readers need to be warned that German / Belgian / French comics tradition is very different from the USA one.) I also strongly suspect my mother didn't quite plan for me to read the books on child rearing she had in our library.

• Primary school: I don't particularly remember the rigid and authoritarian environment of primary school as encouraging scientific curiosity and broad pursuit of knowledge. Which doesn't mean I didn't learn from it, nor remember my years there and the people (including the teachers) with fondness. Luckily, the short hours and quasi non-existent (for me) off-hours workload allowed me to pursue a more complete, if less organised, education.

  Failed attempts to get me interested in the boy scouts movement firmly established by theoretical and abstractions-oriented personality.

• Secondary school: After a brief stay in the Luxembourg general system, I moved (at my request) to a confessional school in Brussels. After a brief stay, I hit the right combination in another confessional school, still in Brussels. That school was far less authoritarian and far more respectful of my dignity as a human being (and the balance of my diet).

  Teacher response to curiosity and off-curriculum questions improved significantly, but the introduction of forced (literary) reading kept me from enjoying literature.

• I started my university-level education in the french “Grandes Écoles” system, which required me to do two preparatory years. I spent them at a (on my scale) terribly authoritarian institution whose seemingly random rules and procedures I never fully understood. The culture shock was huge. These easily count as the worst years in my life, but laid the ground-work for the future in the form of a honours level mathematics and physics bachelor.
• I then entered the research-oriented computing (and modelling) science curriculum of the “École Normale Supérieure de Lyon”. Good memories. Rocks.
• I then went to the Eindhoven University of Technology; first as an exchange student, then as a regular student. While the curriculum was alas less challenging and less dense, I made there crucial contacts to my current situation, and became less of a mono-culture academically.