Journalists compare him to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Nobel laureate Albert Einstein. As a genius or prodigy, the nine-year-old Laurent Simons was repeatedly referred to. Now, just before his undergraduate exam, the boy stopped studying at the Dutch TU Eindhoven - apparently after a quarrel.
The parents of the Belgian-Dutch boy had decided on the interruption of the study, said the father Alexander Simons the German Press Agency. According to the university administration, the parents wanted her son to take his final exam before his tenth birthday in late December. But that was not possible, said the university. Laurent should have taken a few more exams. According to the timetable of the university, Laurent should get his diploma in mid-2020.
Three-year study in ten months
According to the parents there are offers from other top universities. They fear that the TU Eindhoven Laurent wants to hold on longer without reason. That rejects the university. Never before have a student received as much personal guidance as Laurent. It would still be extraordinarily quick if he completed the study of normally three years in ten months.
Laurent is highly gifted and had already graduated from high school at the age of eight. He is currently finishing his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in Eindhoven. It is not yet decided where the boy should continue his studies.
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Famous Wunderkinder: A doctoral degree? Dear two!Since summer 2018 Laurent studies at the prestigious University in the southeast of the Netherlands. With that, he has a steep career behind him: Even the school days in Belgium had passed through the most gifted boy with an IQ of 145 in record time. Laurent was enrolled at the age of four and only needed two years for elementary school. Then he went to high school.
When SPIEGEL Laurent's editors visited Amsterdam in the summer of last year, his father said, "We were late in discovering that he is smarter than others, and his grandparents have told us he is special, but which grandparents think so not from her grandchildren? "
"He is an adventure"
So far, Laurent has also been learning at a madness pace at university: The workload that other students need eight weeks to accomplish in one. He received one-to-one tuition and took the material independently on his own.
"It's an adventure," said his professor the German Press Agency. "But it's so much fun." Sometimes he forgets that his superstudent is still a child: once, in the lab, Laurent could not get a cable loose because he just was not strong enough.
Laurent is particularly interested in technology and science - which has the life of his parents, the father believes, quite upside down: "We now drive an electric car and no old diesel."
And Laurent? He says: "At some point there will be a technical solution to climate change, and we should invest a lot more in research and technology." At the end of his studies he develops a microchip to measure reactions of brain cells. In the field he wants to continue researching: "I want to develop something that can prolong life."