The fascinating true story of two German scientists – Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Grauss - and their quest to discover facts about the world that we take for granted today. The two eccentrics are completely different characters from completely different backgrounds with completely different working styles – but they are brought together by their common yearning for truth and knowledge. Grauss, the great mathematician, born in poverty, is reluctant to get out of bed, let alone leave home (despite the company of his own family who he despises). The aristocratic von Humboldt, the naturalist and explorer, is an emotional loner who travels the world with relentless energy and missionary zeal. Yet this book brings them together forever. If you enjoyed A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, you will enjoy completing your learning curve by reading this book.
Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann's brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment. Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.
'Measuring the World has proved nothing less than a literary sensation... the novel has sold more than 600,000 copies in Germany, knocking J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown off the bestseller lists... it is the most successful German novel since Patrick Süskind’s Perfume ... 31-year old Daniel Kehlmann is a literary wunderkind already being compared to Nabokov and Proust.' Guardian
Author
About Daniel Kehlmann
Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975 and moved to Vienna in 1981, where he studied literature and philosophy at university before going on to complete his doctorate - a thesis on the sublime in the works of Immanuel Kant.
