Hello everyone, I wanted to start this personal blog off with a book review that has given this blog its name: Die Vermessung Der Welt by Daniel Kehlmann.
My First encounter with this book was due to a total coincidence thanks to one of my family members forgetting to turn the TV off and me -while passing by the corridor- hearing the name "Carl Gauss" to get excited enough to pay attention to it, only to find out a movie about German scientists "Carl Friedrich Gauss" and "Alexander von Humboldt". What I saw 5 years ago was indeed the movie adaptation of the book, which I also think of as great unconventionally. If you are into science in any way, doesn't matter how much, it's quite impossible that you haven't heard of Carl Gauss and his contributions to physics and math. Alexander von Humboldt on the other hand, even though while being one of the most famous people of his own time (having pretty much the same popularity as Napoleon), today his recognition is only limited to the German world and only to a small portion of scientists in geoscience fields. It's never my place to say such a thing and I'm sorry for being arrogant but it is a shame for the science community.
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was a German polymath, one of the very few people, in my opinion, to really earn the title "polymath". From what I can tell by reading "The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf, besides being passionately interested in natural sciences, he had obsessions with measuring, recording, collecting, and reporting literally anything that had scientific significance. This actually motivates me in some way.
Alexander had quite a character, I personally would describe him with the words hyperactive, obsessive, and disciplined. Die Vermessung Der Welt pictures him as someone who is passionately interested in what he's doing all the time. Never compromises his principles, deliberately hurts himself for the sake of scientific observation, and measures literally every quantity he can, strictly and diligently. Alexander became famous for his trips to "the New World". He would climb every mountain, and every volcano he saw, and he would enter every cave he could, to collect samples and make measurements. He had quite an obsession with this. People around him would often think of him as crazy.
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