Franz Mertens

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Born: 20 March 1840 in Schroda, Posen, Prussia (now Sroda, Poland)
Died: 5 March 1927 in Vienna, Austria

Franz Mertens studied at Berlin with Kronecker and Kummer. In 1865 he obtained a doctorate with a dissertation on potential theory.

He worked first in Krakóv, then in Graz, then from 1894 in Vienna.

Mertens was a number theorist who is best remembered for his elementary proof of the Dirichlet theorem which appears in most modern textbooks. He worked on analytic number theory and algebra.