Arthur Lindo Patterson

Infobox Scientist
name = Arthur Lindo Patterson
birth_date = birth date|1902|7|23
birth_place = Nelson, New Zealand
death_date = death date and age|1966|11|6|1902|7|23
death_place = Philadelphia, U.S.
residence = Canada, U.S.
citizenship = British,
Canadian,
American
field = Physics, Chemistry
work_institution = McGill University
M.I.T
International Union of Crystallography
Institute for Cancer Research
known_for = Patterson function
particle-size line broadening

Arthur Lindo Patterson (July 23, 1902, Nelson, New Zealand - November 6, 1966, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was a pioneering X-ray crystallographer. Patterson was born to British parents in New Zealand in 1902. Shortly afterwards the family moved to Montreal, Canada and later to London, England. In 1920 Lindo Patterson moved to Canada for college at McGill University, Montreal. Firstly he concentrated on Mathematics and but then changed his major to Physics. He received his bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's in 1924. His master's thesis was on the production of hard X-rays by interaction of radium β rays with solids.

From 1924 to 1926 he worked London in the laboratory with W. H. Bragg where he learnt the art of crystal structure analysis.

Later in 1926 Patterson moved to Kaiser-Wilhelm-institut of Fibrous Materials Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem where he worked on X-ray crystallography of Cellulose fibres. In Berlin he had the fortune to meet with the scientific elite of the time which included Laue, Einstein, Planck, Nernst, Bethe, Hahn, Meitner, Pringsheim.

In 1927 he returned to McGill, finishing his work for the Ph.D. degree in 1928.

Achievements

His work led to some of the first important contributions to the theory of particle-size line broadening.In 1934, while at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed a method of solving crystal structures, the Patterson function, which involves the summing of the Fourier series in two and three dimensions.In addition he became concerned about the problem of uniqueness of the deconvolution of the Patterson function and was ableto show that under some conditions several different atomic arrangements - 'homometric structures' - could exist that would give the same Patterson function and therefore the same intensities in reciprocal space.

Death

On his way to lunch he suddenly began to suffer from a severe headache and soon lost consciousness, from which he never recovered. Death resulted from a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

ee also

* Patterson function
* Structure factor