It brings the two eccentric geniuses to life, their longings and their weaknesses, their balancing act between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success. Measuring the World is a novel of rare charm and readability, distinguished by its sly humour and unforgettable characterization. He can run prime numbers in his head, cannot imagine a life without women and yet jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognised as the greatest mathematician since Newton, does not even need to leave his home in Goettingen to know that space is curved. Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts head lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in the ground. Towards the end of the 18th century, these two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon’s fall.Īlready a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to prove that space is curved. One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. His novel Measuring the World (German: Die Vermessung der Welt) was translated into more than forty languages. The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment. Daniel Kehlmann is a German-Austrian author.

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann