11-year-old Laurent earns bachelor in physics from UAntwerp

An 11-year-old has graduated from the University of Antwerp with a bachelor degree in physics. The young Laurent Simons finished the three-year programme in one year and took a few extra master’s classes alongside it.

Simons has been in the media before, such as when he finished secondary school in Bruges when he was eight. He also famously left the Eindhoven University of Technology in 2019 following a conflict with the institution. The school claimed that the parents were putting too much pressure on the child to finish in one year, and the parents claimed that the university was holding him back to keep the famous lad there longer.

In any case, the Ostend-born genius appears to have completed his physics degree in Antwerp in one academic year, with honours. He will follow this up with a master’s degree and eventually, he says, with a doctorate.

Laurent’s IQ is said to be 145. “Studying just gets better and better,” he told Het Laatste Nieuws. “The more I learn, the more I want to know.”

And he will need to know a lot to achieve his goal, which is, he says, to make people immortal. “Not for myself,” he told the paper, “but for other people, by replacing parts of the body with artificial organs. That’s why I started studying physics. I now want to learn as much as I can and combine all that knowledge. What I want – immortality – can be seen as a puzzle that consists of several parts. Over time, all those pieces have to fit together.”

Photo ©Alexander Simons