Allan McLeod Cormack

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Allan McLeod Cormack (born February 23, 1924 in Johannesburg , South Africa , † May 7, 1998 in Winchester (Massachusetts) , USA ) was a South African-American physicist . He and Godfrey Hounsfield are considered to be the (independent) inventors of computed tomography .

For their research on computed tomography, he and Hounsfield were awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine .

Life and career

Cormack studied physics at the University of Cape Town and graduated in 1944 as a Bachelor of Sciences . There he then obtained a master's degree in crystallography (1945) . He worked at Cambridge University and then returned to Cape Town, where he was given 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 studying at Harvard University , he took up a professorship at Tufts University in 1958 . Although his focus was on particle physics, he also worked in the field of X-ray technology and developed the theoretical principles of computed tomography. The results were published in the Journal of Applied Physics in 1963 and 1964 , but received no further attention until 1972, when Hounsfield and his colleagues built the first computed tomography device based on these two works. For their respective achievements, Cormack and Hounsfield received the 1979 Nobel Prize together. In 1967 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society , in 1980 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and 1983 a member of the National Academy of Sciences .

Cormack died of cancer in 1998 at the age of 74.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gisela Baumgart: Cormack, Allan McLeod. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 273.


personal data
SURNAME Cormack, Allan McLeod
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African-American physicist and 1979 Nobel Laureate in Medicine
DATE OF BIRTH February 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Johannesburg
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1998
Place of death Massachusetts