One subplot fictionalizes the conflict between Gauss and his son Eugene while Eugene wanted to become a linguist, his father decreed that he study law. The novel re-imagines the lives of German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and German geographer Alexander von Humboldt -who was accompanied on his journeys by Aime Bonpland- and their many groundbreaking ways of taking the world's measure, as well as Humboldt's and Bonpland's travels in America and their meeting in 1828.

Measuring the World is a novel by German author Daniel Kehlmann, 2005 published by Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek.

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.ĭie Vermessung der Welt = Measuring the World, Daniel Kehlmann

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. The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment.

Measuring the world by daniel kehlmann