- Used Books - Kobo eReading - Staff Picks - Gifts & Gift Cards
- Sell Books - Stores & Events Special Offers see all More at
Powell's Recently Viewed clear list Measuring the Worldby Daniel
Kehlmann Synopses & Reviews 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
Gottingen 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 kno