I've been travelling these past few days so could not give Remus's review of Measuring The World the attention it deserves 
I have understood (no, really, this time) that while our taste in non-fiction overlaps fairly well, I should never ever try to recommend you a fiction book. Horses for courses and all that, but it's quite surprising that uninspiring, pretty damn boring nonsense is all you got out of it imho.
In a light and humorous way, Measuring The World compares the parallel-but-vastly-different lives of Gauss (arguably the greatest mathematician who has ever lived) and Humboldt (geographer). One was a singular genius, a child prodigy of very low socioeconomic origins although he turns out to be rigid and intolerant, and the other was an aristocrat with all the means who was modest and forgiving of lesser intellects. One never travelled far from home so never really learned about the world but explored the universe in his mind, while the other travelled the world and learned more about it than most other people. "One likes sex, the other is pretty much asexual... one likes running around measuring hills and stuff, and the other one does sums" is a shockingly inaccurate and unfair description of how these men's lives play out in this book.
And the book is about so much more than these two men and their discoveries. The undercurrent of the book is the political tide of revolutions that is about to sweep over Europe in 1848. Humboldt, who has travelled extensively and seen the horrors when nations are conquered & exploited, talks about slavery & "the burden of despotism and the exploitation of earth's riches, which produce and sterile form of wealth from which the economy could never profit" while Gauss says "Princes were poor pigs too, they lived and struggled and died like everyone else. The real tyrants were the laws of nature".
The book is also about the struggle towards knowledge and understanding, in a world that was (and still is, really) staunchly ignorant and populated mostly by superstitious, irrational people of limited curiosity and intellect.
"Gauss's conversation turned to chance, the enemy of all knowledge and the thing he had always wished to overcome. Viewed form up close, one could detect the infinite fineness of the web of causality behind every event. Step back and the larger patterns appeared : Freedom and Chance were a question of distance, a point of view." "The world could be calculated after a fashion, but that was a very long way from understanding it"
If anyone knows of a book that talks about such "uninspiring boring nonsense", please do let me know because I live for this stuff 