About Allan MacLeod Cormack
Allan MacLeod Cormack was a South African and American physicist, academic, and Nobel Laureate. He was Professor of Physics at Tufts University and won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on X-ray computed tomography (CT), a significant and unusual achievement since Cormack did not hold a doctoral degree in any scientific field. These papers generated little interest until Hounsfield and colleagues built the first CT scanner in 1971 in the UK, taking Cormack's theoretical calculations into a real application. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Mapungubwe on December 10, 2002, for outstanding achievements as a scientist and for co-inventing the CT scanner. Following a sabbatical at Harvard in 1956–57, the couple agreed to move to the United States, and Cormack became a professor at Tufts University in the fall of 1957. Cormack became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966.
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