Allan McLeod Cormack

Allan McLeod Cormack ( born February 23, 1924 in Johannesburg, South Africa; † 7 May 1998 in Winchester ( Massachusetts), USA ) was a South African- American physicist.

For his work on the computer tomography in 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Sir Godfrey Hounsfield.

Life and career

Cormack studied physics at the University of Cape Town and graduated with a Bachelor of Sciences in 1944 from the study. There he acquired subsequently (1945 ) a master's degree in crystallography. He worked at the University of Cambridge and then returned to Cape Town where he obtained a teaching position. During his time in Cambridge he met the American physics student Barbara Seavey, whom he later married.

With Seavey, he emigrated to the United States. After a period of study at Harvard University, he joined in 1958 as a professor at Tufts University. Although his focus was on particle physics, he worked part-time in the field of X-ray technology and developed the theoretical foundations of computer tomography. The results were published in 1963 and 1964 in the Journal of Applied Physics, but found no more attention until Hounsfield and his colleagues in 1972 on the basis of these two works built the first computer tomography device. For their respective achievements Cormack and Hounsfield in 1979 jointly received the Nobel Prize.

Cormack died in 1998 at 74 years of cancer.