FictionThe heyday of the German Enlightenment produced, among others, two men whose genius would have shone in any age. Carl Gauss (1777-1855) was one of the greatest mathematicians ever born.
He applied mathematics to astronomy, geodesy and physics. His theory of numbers, published when he was 24, remains one of the most brilliant achievements in the history of mathematics. Gauss was a pioneer in applying mathematics to gravitation, electricity and magnetism, and provided an efficient way for calculating the orbits of asteroids. The gauss, a unit of magnetic measurement, is named for him. Einstein owed much to Gauss's ground-breaking work.
Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859) achieved international renown as the chief propagator in his time of the study of earth sciences and as the originator of ecology. At the age of 30 he embarked on what would be a five-year expedition to Central and South America. It became one of the greatest scientific expeditions of all time. Von Humboldt was the first European to explore and document the Orinoco River. The Humboldt Current, off Peru, is named for him. The modern sciences of continental drift theory, geography, mapping and mountain formation owe much to Alexander von Humboldt.
Measuring the World is a novel based on the lives of these two extraordinary characters. It puts Von Humboldt and Gauss together in 1828 in the University of Berlin at the first ever international scientific conference, organised by Von Humboldt. The two lives and the two men could not be more different. Gauss, the son of illiterate peasants, is morose, lazy, grumpy, gross and incapable of relating warmly either to his wife or children. He cannot understand the stupidity in virtually everyone he meets. The closest he ever gets to a loving relationship (apart from his mother) is with a Russian whore, for whom he learns her language. Everything about Gauss's life is inward and closed off; yet, with his mind he provides the means for mankind to explore the universe.
Von Humboldt is in many respects Gauss's perfect opposite. A Prussian aristocrat, he is schooled from the cradle for greatness. Pedantic, asexual, meticulous, spry and indefatigable, Von Humboldt's hunger to know and record more about the natural world than anyone before him ensures his lifetime will be spent down mines, scaling mountains, and thrashing through dense jungles in search of plants and flowers never before recorded.
Gauss's obstacles in early life arise from his lowly beginnings. No one can believe that a boy of eight, the son of a gardener, can have such a grasp of advanced mathematics. He is punished for his genius. When his first papers are published, they appear under the name of tutors, since it would be unseemly for a student to be so erudite.
Von Humboldt's obstacles arise from his self-imposed race to achieve the greatness he knows awaits him. He courts fame as much as Gauss shuns it. On his return from South America, he publishes 30 volumes, together with drawings and beautiful engravings of data accumulated on his expedition, an early exercise in vanity publishing that depletes his fortune but gives the world a priceless treasure of ecological information.
Such is the piercing intensity of their intellects, neither Gauss nor Von Humboldt ever know the peace of a personal relationship. There is no time. Von Humboldt ceaselessly climbs, measures, catalogues, searches and wonders without end about such matters as "why, given so many stars, the sky was not permanently filled with light, why there was so much black out there. [ He concluded] that there was something opposed to light, something that acted as a block in the intervening space, a light- extinguishing ether."
Gauss, who at the 1828 conference, in a throwaway remark, solves Daguerre's problem of fixing the silver iodide in an exposure, thus opening the way for modern photography to proceed, is the more tormented of the two geniuses. His brain gallops almost beyond his control, sorting everything and everyone he sees into categories: "Half the men were in uniform, a third of them had mustaches. Only one seventh of the audience were women, only a quarter of these were under thirty, only two weren't ugly . . ."
In this most original and entertaining novel, two characters whose names have become fossilised as mere scientific labels, are reborn as vivid flesh and blood.
Peter Cunningham is a writer. His most recent novel, The Taoiseach, is published by Hodder Lir
Measuring the World By Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Carol Brown Janeway Quercus, 259pp. £12.99