Measuring the World : A Novel

Summary: At the end of the 18th century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, Alexander von Humboldt, fought his way through jungles and across the steppes. The other, mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, stayed at home in Gottingen, and proved that space is curved. In MEASURING THE WORLD, acclaimed German author Daniel Kehlmann reinterprets one of the most amazing en counters that cultural history has to offer: in 1828 Humboldt met the mathematician and astronomer Gauss during a conference in Berlin. One of them had traveled the whole globe, while the other had remained in a small German town to study, but, they had one thing in common: they both wanted to understand and measure the world in their own manner. With imagination and a great deal of humor, Daniel Kehlmann depicts the lives of two geniuses, their longings and their weaknesses, their balancing act between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success