le théorème de l’engambi

When I climbed in Luminy last year, one of the ways was called le théorème de l’engambi. Looking on the internet, I found this was the title of a book written by a local, Maurice Gouiran. The other evening, at the airport, the book was on sale in the bookstore, so I bought it and read it in the plane back to Paris. It is a local crime novel with highly local characters (to the point I do not understand all they say), local places like l’Estaque, the OM football club, La Gineste, Luminy, and what is apparently the most appealing theorem in novels, Fermat’s last theorem! (Engambi means messy affair in local dialect.) Overall the book is more pleasant to read for the local flavour than for the crime enquiry per se, especially because it involves scenes that take place in CIRM itself (including the restaurant and the terrace outside under the old oaks!). There is of course no indication on the nature of the three page proof produced by the first corpse of the book, but the description of the mathematical community is rather accurate, overall. The author mentions in a postnote that he is aware of Wiles’ proof, but believes (as a poet) in an alternative proof that Fermat had really found. (This book is not to be confused with Guedj’s parrot theorem, which is a novelesque story of mathematics, even though it ends up on the same premise that a parrot could recite Fermat’s proof…)