Samuel James Patterson
British mathematician
Samuel James Patterson (September 7, 1948 in Belfast) is a Northern Irish mathematician specializing in analytic number theory. He has been a professor at the University of Göttingen since 1981.
Biography
Patterson was born in Belfast and grew up in the east of the city, attending Grosvenor High School. He went to Clare College, Cambridge, in 1967, and received his BA in mathematics in 1970, and his Ph.D. (completed in 1974, awarded in 1975) on "The limit set of a Fuchsian group" under Alan Beardon. He spent 1974–1975 at Göttingen, 1975–1979 he was back at Cambridge, and 1979–1981 he was at Harvard as Benjamin Pierce Lecturer. From 1981 to his retirement in 2011 he was professor of mathematics at Göttingen.
His 18 PhD students include Jörg Brüdern and Bernd Otto Stratmann.
He is the brother of the Northern Irish taxonomist David Joseph Patterson.
Mathematics
Subjects that Patterson deals with include discontinuous groups (Fuchsian groups), different zeta functions (for example those of Ruelle and Selberg, in particular those associated with certain groups of infinite covolume), metaplectic groups, generalized theta functions, and exponential sums in analytical number theory.
In 1978, together with Roger Heath-Brown, he disproved the Kummer conjecture on cubic Gauss sums.
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This entry incorporates text from “Samuel James Patterson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.