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The mathematician Gauss, in contrast, is a testy, impulsive, melancholy homebody, who sleeps late and makes endless, irritated demands of those around him. If he is less likable than Humboldt it is because he has less vitality. In fact, an early confrontation with suicide casts a long shadow of despair across his maturation. Gauss also lacks Humboldt's aristocratic ease. As the novel passes from the 18th to the 19th century, Humboldt becomes an emblem of a passing hierarchical world: the leisurely, generalist gentleman, who uses his high advantages in the service of humanity, but who is ultimately na•ve about actual human beings.

Gauss is more modern. He is the hard-working specialist who has suffered too much to be nostalgic for older orders but who isn't, because of that, liberated by the new. Gauss is a hermit sage, cantankerous, cruel and darkly wise. His wedding speech, in which he declares happiness to be "something like a mistake in arithmetic, an error" captures his sour stoicism, and then provokes from his bride one of the book's best lines: "It was exactly the speech she had always dreamed of for her wedding." We are not surprised in the least when, later, losing his connubial concentration, Gauss springs out of bed to jot down a math insight. The stars, unlike the sheets, cannot be asked to wait. Gauss' brilliance helped measure the world, but like Humboldt he lacks the instruments to measure human concerns -- especially his own.

Throughout the novel, then, Gauss is the more cynical yin to Humboldt's comic yang. Both men lack all appreciation for art, whose impact can't be quantified, and Kehlmann's rich artistic portrayals suggest that this is their deeper problem. These great minds study, describe and order the cosmos, but they remain private residents of their own small lives. As they meet late in the novel, having failed to achieve what they saw as their destinies, their best work behind them, perhaps to be forgotten by posterity, surely to be surpassed, they each experience the inevitable closing in of time, which measures all our passing days as sure as math measures the seemingly permanent heavens.

This terrifying reduction of great minds to their private confrontation with mortality is the novel's tragic underside. As Kehlmann draws the two men together on the far side of their accomplishments, the scenes are philosophically tense and emotionally painful -- and even, because emotions have been so spare in the story, revelatory. That a 31-year-old writer has done this with zest and humor, historical range and impressive authority, feels like a fortuitous theft. Kehlmann has picked Nature's pocket and offered us the marvelous booty.

(Todd Shy is a writer who teaches at Cary Academy.)

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