Short answers, pulled from the story.
Belgium earned the nickname "the Battlefield of Europe" because centuries of invasion and control by larger neighboring powers left it a repeated site of armed conflict. Both world wars reinforced the reputation, with Germany invading in August 1914 and again in May 1940, and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I taking place in western Belgium.
Belgium has three official languages: Dutch, French, and German. An estimated 60 percent of the population are native Dutch speakers concentrated in Flanders, around 40 percent speak French natively in Wallonia and Brussels, and the German-speaking Community in the East Cantons numbers around 73,000 people.
Belgium established independence in 1830 following the Belgian Revolution, which separated the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands. Leopold I was installed as king on the 21st of July 1831, a date now celebrated as Belgium's National Day.
Belgium's six governments exist because the country restructured from a unitary state into a federal one through constitutional revisions in 1970, 1980, 1988, and 1993, driven by deep linguistic and cultural tensions between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons. The system comprises the federal government, three language communities, and the three regions, with Flemish politicians merging their regional and community institutions into one body.
Belgium went 589 days without a formal government following the June 2010 federal elections, setting a world record at the time. The crisis ended in December 2011 when the Di Rupo Government, led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo, was sworn in.
Belgian scientists include Georges Lemaître, who proposed the Big Bang theory in 1927, and Leo Baekeland, who developed Bakelite between 1907 and 1909. Belgians have won Nobel Prizes in Physics (François Englert, 2013), Chemistry (Ilya Prigogine, 1977), and Physiology or Medicine on three occasions: Jules Bordet in 1919, Corneille Heymans in 1938, and Albert Claude with Christian de Duve in 1974.