It always seemed to me that the Mathematical Community gives an high importance to the act of properly cite an author (Do not write Erdos! It's Erdős. Cauchy must be read as in French, not as in English...).

Hence, I thought that it could have been useful to ask your opinion about how to cite correctly a foreign and/or complicated author name in the references. It seems that bibtex handles well only standard English style names, and requires many workarounds for foreign names (see here). So it is better not to count too much on it.

Feel free to point out any suggestion, or even the problems you have come across when citing authors.

I start a list:

First, Middle, Last - Names. OK, I think there are no doubts, "John Horton Conway" should be cited as "J. H. Conway". Note the whitespaces after each period.

Spanish names: To my understanding (well, thanks to wikipedia here), in Spain people have one or two given names and two surnames (usually, one from the father and one from the mother). Moreover, each surnames can be composite, the composition is done by the conjunctions y, e, -, or the preposition de. Then, how to cite the "worst case" Juan Pablo Fernández de Calderón García-Iglesias?

Chinese names: Here I am often in trouble. I read that Chinese write first their surname and then their first name, but I think that in papers they are usually swapped. Also I heard that many Chinese have the same surname.