Measuring the World captures a historical turning point, when European acquisition of knowledge about the world is undergoing a drastic change. The monks cannot figure out what Humboldt and his companion Bonpland want of them the abbot expresses his suspicion thusly: “nobody traveled half way around the world to measure land that didn’t even belong to him” (Kehlmann 58). Soon after his arrival, Humboldt visits a Christian mission, set up to baptize the natives. With permission from the offices of the Spanish colonial regime in Madrid, in 1799 Humboldt arrives in New Amsterdam, Trinidad, to begin what will be recorded in history as one of the most important explorations of all times. Humboldt’s quest for scientific knowledge would take him to the geographical “new” world. His passion for exactitude draws him to work on the law of quadratic reciprocity and the frequency of prime numbers: “At the base of physics were rules, at the base of rules there were laws, at the base of laws there were numbers” (Kehlmann 73). Daniel Kehlmann’s international bestseller Die Vermessung der Welt (2005 Measuring the World, 2007) narrates the quest for knowledge through the lives of two giants of the nineteenth century: the botanist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt, and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss.
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