It may seem clumsy, but I write and pronounce Mertens's, Jones's, Gauss's, Menelaus's, Pythagoras's, etc. Fowler, writing around WW1, said `It was FORMERLY [my stress] customary, when a word ended in -s, to write its possessive with an apostrophe but no additional s. In verse, & in reverential contexts, this custom is retained, & the number of syllables is the same as in the subjective case. But elsewhere we now add the s & the syllable. Mertens' might be appropiate if two people named Merten had collaborated. R. On Mon, 19 May 2003, Joshua Zelinsky wrote:
Hi Richard,
Carl Pomerance and Ivic have pointed out a few minor mistakes in my paper. First, I neglected to include the reference to where Ivic proved his improvement of the Erdos bounds: "The distribution of primitive abundant numbers." Studia Scien. Math. Hungarica 20(1985), 183-187. Second, where I wrote "Merten's Theorem", that should be "Mertens' Theorem." Third, Pomerance has alerted me that he had already produced a similar heuristic argument for the non-existence of odd perfect numbers which he presented at a lecture at Berkeley in 2000. Thus, the claim that the paper presents the first such heuristic is inaccurate.
Regards, Josh Z
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