Measuring the World

German-Austrian author Daniel Kehlmann’s historical novel, Measuring the World (2005), offers a fictionalized account of the lives of the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and the German geographer Alexander von Humboldt, two figures who in the 19th century developed groundbreaking methods for measuring the Earth. The book was adapted into a film directed by Detlev Buck in 2012.

Although Gauss and Humboldt meet briefly in the first chapter at the 1828 German Scientific Congress in Berlin, the two characters spend most of the book apart, as the author flashes to each of their early lives then alternates between their stories in each chapter. Born in 1769 in Prussia, Humboldt belongs to a prominent family of some wealth. Groomed for greatness from an early age, Humboldt finds early success as a young scientist helping mining companies to increase their output. Over the next few years, he embarks on various geological and botanical tours financed by the state, but he dreams of traveling to the New World. In 1796, the death of his stern mother for whom Humboldt has little affection allows him to pursue this dream.

By contrast, Gauss comes from wildly different circumstances. Born in 1777, Gauss belongs to a poor working-class family and illiterate parents. Despite these humble beginnings, Gauss is a child prodigy who begins correcting adults' math mistakes at the age of three. By the time he is a teenager, he begins to make groundbreaking mathematical discoveries, and at the age of 21, he writes the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, a fundamental text in the field of number theory whose influence persists to this day. As Gauss works on the text, he considers whether what he is doing is sacrilegious: "At the base of laws there were numbers; if one looked at them intently, one could recognize relationships between them, repulsions or attractions. Some aspects of their construction seemed incomplete, occasionally hastily thought out, and more than once he thought he recognized roughly concealed mistakes—as if God has permitted Himself to be negligent and hoped nobody would notice."



While Gauss is huddled over mathematical equations and texts, Humboldt travels the world, departing on a trip to Central and South America in 1799 with his new friend and colleague, the French explorer and botanist Aime Bonpland. On a stop in the Canary Islands on the way there, Humboldt must tear Bonpland off a naked native woman on Tenerife. While Bonpland seeks to have sex with virtually every woman they meet, Humboldt largely keeps to himself, doing diligent and quiet scientific work, such as scraping moss from cave walls to measure its dampness. When the two reach Ecuador, they climb Mount Chimborazo in the Andes, which at that time was thought by Europeans to be the highest peak in the world.

When Gauss doesn't have his head in a book, he works as a land surveyor to keep from falling into poverty. Although surveying is initially a day job, something he considers unworthy of his immense talents, this work leads him to one of his most groundbreaking discoveries: that Euclid, the father of modern geometry, was wrong when he argued parallel lines never meet. Rather, space is "folded, bent, and extremely strange." Fearing the controversy over questioning the fundamentals of Euclidian geometry, Gauss never publishes these findings; they only survive through letters he writes to colleagues. However, the later 20th-century work of Albert Einstein regarding relativity would serve as further confirmation of Gauss's suspicions that the universe was non-Euclidian.

Around the turn of the century, Gauss proposes to Johanna Osthoff. She rejects him, and Gauss tries to kill himself by ingesting the poison plant curare. Rather than die, the plant just makes him sick. As he recovers, a message arrives stating that Johanna will marry him after all. They have six children together including Eugen, whom Gauss finds to be hopelessly stupid and inadequate.



The author juxtaposes Gauss's bout of illness from curare with a scene of Humboldt and Bonpland under attack by electric eels while exploring the Orinoco River. The eels cause a painful shock that "seemed more like something that belonged to the outside world than to one's own body." They end the trip by traveling up to Spain and then to the United States, where Humboldt meets with President Thomas Jefferson, explaining to him the exact borders of the Louisiana Purchase he just made. Later, a few years after returning to Europe, Humboldt becomes embroiled in the diplomatic politics between the Prussian monarchy and Napoleon's invading army from France. Gauss, on the other hand, hardly notices politics.

The key take away from the book is that it contrasts the wildly different approaches and personalities of two brilliant men who sought to better measure the world—Humboldt by navigating rivers and climbing mountains, and Gauss through mathematical equations. In observing Gauss's approach, Kehlmann writes, "Gauss observed the movement of the magnetic needle by the light of an oil lamp for hour after hour. No sound penetrated to him. Just as the balloon flight showed him what space was, at some point he would understand the restlessness in the heart of NATURE. One didn’t need to clamber up mountains or torment oneself in the jungle. Whosoever observed the needle was looking into the interior of the world."

According to the Guardian, Measuring the World is "a magnificent novel."