Samuel James Patterson (September 7, 1948 in Belfast)[2] is a Northern Irish mathematician specializing in analytic number theory.

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.

[11][12] He proposed a new conjecture[13] which was based on insights from his determination of the coefficients of the cuspidal Fourier expansions of the metaplectic cubic theta function.

[14][15] This revised conjecture remained open until 2021, when it was finally proved by Alexander Dunn and Maksym Radziwiłł at Caltech.

[27] A commemorative volume, Contributions in Analytic and Algebraic Number Theory (Springer 2012), edited by Valentin Blomer & Preda Mihăilescu, collecting articles related to or developed at the conference, was issued as a Festschrift for him.