Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Shapiro and Forman have presented in (4) an abstract formulation of prime number theorems which includes the various prime number theorems; for primes in arithmetic progressions, for prime ideals in ideal classes etc. The methods of proofs are “elementary” and follow closely Shapiro's proof for the primes in arithmetic progression (for reference see bibliography in (4)).
The author has followed in (1) some ideas of Yamamoto (5) on arithmetic linear transformations to introduce a symbolic calculus in dealing with arithmetic functions. This calculus proved to be very useful in unifying many of the “elementary” proofs in the behaviour of arithmetic functions. In (6) Yamamoto has extended his theory to ideals in algebraic number fields, and with this extension the symbolic calculus of (1) can be extended to cover the abstract case of prime number theorem in countable free abelian groups as discussed in (4).