The novel “Measuring the World” is compelling, intelligent, and subtly humorous. It tells about 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 people were very different in every way. And if Humboldt traveled almost all around the globe, Gauss almost never left his home—yet that did not prevent each of them, in their own way, from studying this imperfect world thoroughly and “measuring” it brilliantly.