Arthur Lindo Patterson (23 July 1902, Nelson, New Zealand – 6 November 1966, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) was a pioneering British X-ray crystallographer.
His master's thesis was on the production of hard X-rays by interaction of radium β rays with solids.
In Berlin he had the fortune to meet the scientific elite of the time, which included Max von Laue, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Walther Nernst, Hans Bethe, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Peter Pringsheim.
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.