num_pages: 259
description: The young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann conjures a brilliant and gently comic novel from the lives of two geniuses of the Enlightenment.Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. 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. 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. He can run prime numbers in his head. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon’s fall.Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.
language: English
title: Measuring the World
titlecomplete: Measuring the World
characters: Alexander von Humboldt, Eugen Gauss, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Aimé Bonpland
genres: Fiction, Contemporary, German Literature, Historical, Roman, Germany, Historical Fiction, Travel, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 18007
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Exclusive Books Boeke Prize, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: PEN Translation Prize
category: Carol Brown Janeway, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize)
category: Shortlist
publisher: Pantheon