Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. Albert Einstein

Love is the absence of judgment. Dalai-lama

Stay hungry, stay foolish. Steve Jobs

Speaking has a lot more strength to persuade than writing. René Descartes

There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them. Henri Bergson

Man's life is like a light before the wind. Japanese proverb

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. Dalai-lama

Mathematics is a part of physics. Vladimir Arnold

1997-2003

The first 7 years of my life have nothing special: I am a small child, who loves having fun, playing football and going to school.

2004-2008

When I am 7, I discover tennis, a sport I like very quickly. 2 years after I started playing tennis, I am asked to try competition, what I accept. I start tournaments in the under 10 category.

My first tournament is the Gard championship where I lose in Final. To keep going on, I participate in other tournaments, a dozen in total during the year. I finished the season, in September, with the rank of 30/2 (french connoisseurs will understand).

This first year of competition learnt me many things: it allowed me to discover what is "pressure/tension" (before the beginning of a match or during important moments) and to manage it better, to control my feelings and to improve my concentration because remaining lucid a whole match is not something easy.

With the end of my first year of tennis in competition, comes the start of the school year, in September. This year, I go on to college, in grade 6. I have no difficulty with this change: I like the new organization of the courses. I discover new subjects and have a taste for maths, maybe because I get good grades.

This new school year is also marked by a new season of tennis and competition. This season, I play more, participate in many more tournaments and progress more. At each tournaments, I win 3/4 matches. At the end of the season, after 110 matches and winning the Gard championship this time, I finish with the rank of 15/3, but I lose my motivation: I don't want to play so much any more, I am fed up getting into matches the evening after school, and having butterflies in my stomach before each match (my parents never put pressure on me).

2009-2011

A new season of tennis begins, but I'm still not motivated: I want to train but not to participate in tournamements. My parents motivate me to continue (I shall realize, some years later, they were right). Then, I get back on participating at the same number of tournaments than the previous season, but this time, I lose after 1 or 2 matches, because I don't have the level for my rank and don't have the will to win any more.

The following 2 seasons are of the same quality: I still don't want to win. I progress, but with difficulty, and finish with the rank of 15/1 at the end of grade 9. It is not a low ranking but the best players my age have a much better rank: they train more than me, are more motivated and are probably better.

As far as the school is concerned, I still have good grades: I pass my school certificate easily. I still enjoy maths and discovered, on an initation of my father during grade 8, computer programming. This discovery was a revelation for me because I found, in programming, a way to create, to design, to invent wonderful things, with only a small computer and from his bedroom.

My father introduced me to programming by making me discover bases of algorithms (variables, loops, conditions, functions) and then making me apply these bases in Pascal language. Then, I continued alone my learning by practising in the C++ language thanks to OpenClassrooms. So, I was able to begin the creation of small programs, with graphical interfaces (GUI) sometimes with Qt.

My first real project was the realization of lots of small command line programs to solve the majority of the exercises of the various chapters of the math program of grade 9. For example, one of these small programs allowed to compute the length of one of the sides of a right-angled triangle, knowing the length of the 2 others. The program displayed the length of the side computed, but also all the necessary writing to answer the exercise. Then, pupils only have to copy out. However, even if I was able to finish this project, I never managed to make it use by my friends, my interface being too austere.

2012-2014

September 2011 was the month of my high school entrance. I was not disrupted by the change. During this year, I continued my programming exploration and, in my research, I discovered the Web development (I talk about this discovery in the presentation of my projects). Then, for a while, I only spent time on this type of programming.

As far as tennis is concerned, I found the motivation and I started to win matches, to see some results. But, having grown up a lot in 6 months (8 centimeters), I had an Osgood-Schlatter, a growth disease, and had to slow down, almost stop my tennis activity during one year. But at the end of this year, I never started again, or at least, not as before: now, I only participate in some tournaments a year.

During my last 2 years of high school, I naturally continued programming, especially Web development, but discovered many other things:

• the Python langage, by solving challenges given by my high school math teacher
• a deeper taste for maths thanks to this same math teacher. To discover a little more this domain, my parents bought me, in the middle of the final year, the "MPSI : Mathématiques tout-en-un" book that I stupied alone and entirely during the remainder of the year
• the Project Euler, a website I talk about very often here, on my blog and to my friends

These 3 high school years ended with the high school diploma that I passed quite easily.

Currently

As I am speaking to you, I enter, tomorrow, into MPSI preparatory class in the Pierre de Fermat high school in Toulouse.