PureGin.org

I finally picked up Daniel Kehlmann's novel Measuring the World, which I was given for Christmas by my Mom. It's been a phenomenal bestseller in Germany, and is now available in an English translation by Carol Brown Janeway. Kehlmann imagines the lives of Alexander von Humbolt, the great Prussian explorer and naturalist, and Karl Friedrich Gauss, one of the most deep, visionary, brilliant (and yet enigmatic) mathematicians that ever lived.

The novel opens with the meeting in 1828 of Gauss and Humbolt, at the German Scientific Congress in Berlin. The world is slowly entering the modern age, in which change replaces stasis, motion supplants rest as the natural state of objects, and it appears that everything, old and new, near or far, is becoming open to exploration. The onset of this new age comes perhaps too slowly for Gauss, for whom the quickest of his contemporaries was only a little less slow than a run-of-the-mill dullard.

Kehlmann's Gauss and Humbolt, fictional creations, are 2.5 dimensional figures brought to richly comic existence in a reality whose boundaries and meanings are uncertain and prone to unexpected shifts.

to be continued...