Allan Cormac

Allan Cormac was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1924. He attended the Rondebosch Boys High School. He went to the University of Cape Town and studied electrical engineering. Later, he turned to physics and graduated with bachelor and master degrees in physics. After graduation, he went to St. John's College, Cambridge and worked at the Cavendish Laboratory under Prof. Otto Frisch on problems connected with He⁶, which is an important component in Biological Physics. He returned to Cape Town in 1950, accepting a post as a Lecturer in Nuclear Physics.

At Cape Town, Cormac specialised in nuclear physics. In 1956 he became interested in medical physics, especially an area known as computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanning. In 1963, by the ingenious use of mathematical techniques which he first encountered in X-ray crystallography, he generalised his CAT theory substantially. His interest in X-ray technology led him to develop the theoretical foundations that made computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanning possible. He published his results in two papers in 1963-64, but these generated little interest until the first CAT scan machine, built under the leadership of Godfrey Hounsfield, was introduced in 1972 in a London hospital. Now CAT scanning machines have become standard and are widely used in hospitals around the world. Cormac received the Nobel Prize in Medicine 1979 (shared with Hounsfield), "for the development of computer assisted tomography".

Outside academic research, Cormac was very actively involved in a wide range of activities: tennis, travelling, swimming, sailing and his favourite hobby, reading. From 1958 onwards, Cormac began working for the Physics Department, Tufts University, MA, USA, where he became the Chairman from 1968 to 1976. He married Barbara Seavey during his time as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory and they had two daughters and one son. He died in 1998.