‘The novel ‘Measuring the World’ fascinatingly, intelligently, and with subtle humor tells the story of two geniuses of the Enlightenment era, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, as typical representatives of the German national character in all its manifestations. These two outstanding men were very different in every respect. While Humboldt traveled almost the entire globe, Gauss almost never left his hometown, yet this did not prevent each of them, in their own way, from comprehensively studying and brilliantly ‘measuring’ this imperfect world.