Daniel Kehlmann is a German-language novelist and playwright of both Austrian and German nationality. His novel Die Vermessung der Welt is the best selling book in the German language since Patrick Süskind's Perfume was released in 1985. In an ironic way, it deals with Alexander von Humboldt, one of the world's best-known naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and Humboldt's relationship with the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.