Measuring the World
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Editor’s note Daniel Kehlmann’s 2005 novel runs two lives side by side: Alexander von Humboldt, who climbs volcanoes and paddles up the Orinoco on his American expedition of 1799 to 1804, and Carl Friedrich Gauss, who barely leaves Göttingen and measures the world with mathematics. The two finally meet in Berlin in 1828, two ageing celebrities with little patience for each other. Told almost entirely in indirect speech and with dry irony, it became one of the best-selling German novels since the war; Detlev Buck filmed it in 2012.
About the book
Measuring the World is a novel by German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann, published in 2005 by Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek. 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 French explorer Aimé Bonpland—and their many groundbreaking ways of taking the world's measure, as well as Humboldt's and Bonpland's travels in America and Humboldt's meeting with Gauss in 1828. One subplot fictionalises the conflict between Gauss and his son Eugene; while Eugene wanted to become a linguist, his father decreed that he study law. The book was a bestseller; by 2012, it had sold more than 2.3 million copies in Germany alone.