At the end of the 18th century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, Alexander von Humboldt, fought his way through jungles and across the steppes. The other, mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, stayed at home in Gottingen, and proved that space is curved. In MEASURING THE WORLD, acclaimed German author Daniel Kehlmann reinterprets one of the most amazing en counters that cultural history has to offer: in 1828 Humboldt met the mathematician and astronomer Gauss during a conference in Berlin. One of them had traveled the whole globe, while the other had remained in a small German town to study, but, they had one thing in common: they both wanted to understand and measure the world in their own manner. With imagination and a great deal of humor, Daniel Kehlmann depicts the lives of two geniuses, their longings and their weaknesses, their balancing act between loneliness and love, absurdity and greatness, failure and success.

Daniel Khlmann was born in 1975 in Munich, the son of a director and an actress. He attended a Jesuit college in Vienna, traveled widely, and has won several awards for previous novels ans short stories, most recently the 2005 Candide Award. His works have been translated into more than twenty laguanges, and Measuring the World became an instant best seller in several European countries. Kehlmann is spending the fall of 2006 as writer-in-residence at New York University's Deutsches Haus. He lives in Vienna.