Gauss looks at the stars and sees entropy. Humboldt is eternally optimistic about social progress. His troubles with two wives and sets of children rival Humboldt’s problems with colonials and natives. Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and. Pure mathematician Gauss is obsessed with women. Swashbuckling adventurer Humboldt seems asexual. Gauss’s mother lives with him for the last 22 years of her life. Humboldt is ecstatic when his mother dies, allowing him to leave Prussia. By treating the two men together, Kehlmann not only contrasts the inductive and deductive, the experimental and the imaginative, but also shows how these methods are connected to very different though occasionally similar sensibilities. Portraying a stay-at-home mathematician’s mind is more challenging, but Kehlmann provides just enough geometry and physics to represent Gauss’s inventive rigor and odd foresight without losing barely numerate readers. › █ █ █ Daniel Kehlmann Measuring The World Pdf Map █ █ █ĭaniel Kehlmann Credit Sven Paustian The Humboldt chapters - with their physical dangers, odd flora, and cameos by notables like Goethe and Jefferson - supply much of the narrative excitement.
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