Abstract: was born in France, in 1941, during the Second World War.He was one of France's "hidden children," protected during the Nazi occupation by being sent to live with a French non-Jewish family in the countryside.His father was in the French resistance, and was captured and killed in Auschwitz.After the war, Lucien was reunited with his mother.She remarried and had two more sons.The family lived in the small village of Livry Gargan, outside of Paris, before moving to Paris in the 1950s.When Lucien was in high school, he often got into trouble at school.He was not a big fan of following rules.He preferred making the class laugh at his jokes to being quiet and obedient.He didn't do his homework.He regularly confronted right-wing youth gangs waiting for a fight at the exit of the high school.Outside the classroom he had many interests: cinema, chess, music, politics.He often visited the famous Cinémathéque Française, which French New Wave directors Truffaut and Goddard had frequented only a few years earlier.But in school, mathematics was the one subject that strongly interested him.His mathematics teachers took an interest in him and became his mentors and supporters, and he was designated to participate in the highly competitive, countrywide Concours Géneral in math.