Youth
I grew up in the south of the Netherlands, in Nuenen, a village best known for the fact that Vincent van Gogh was unhappy there for a few years of his life. The second most famous person from Nuenen, dixit Wikipedia, is a computer scientist! Edsger W. Dijkstra lived a few streets away from where I was born. My niece was his neighbor for a while. The E. W. Dijkstra Archive is amazing. It has a lot of handwritten manuscripts, even from after 2000. Because, after all, a real computer scientist only needs a pencil and a piece of paper.
After high school at the Augustinianum, I decided to study physics at the nearby Eindhoven University of Technology. I’m not really sure what made me do that, but certainly not my high school physics teacher. He was a very friendly guy with the tendency to ask the students questions, and most students had no idea what to answer. He would then stare patiently out of the window, for prolonged periods of time. This is how I remember my years in high school: sitting in a classroom for fifty minutes and almost nothing happened; then going to the next classroom where the same thing would repeat; after six such sessions you could go home again and play soccer in the street. Among all subjects taught at high school, I liked physics best, and I did not disagree with what the teachers told me about it, contrary to anything related to humanities. My sixteen-year-old rebellious self did not want to be taught anything about literature or arts by old men at a university.
So I decided to become a physicist.