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South African-American physicist
Allan MacLeod Cormack
(February 23, 1924 ? May 7, 1998) was a
South African American
physicist
who won the 1979
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
(along with
Godfrey Hounsfield
) 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.
[1]
[2]
Early life and education
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Cormack was born on February 23, 1924, in
Johannesburg
, South Africa. He attended
Rondebosch Boys' High School
in
Cape Town
, where he was active in the debating and tennis teams.
[3]
He received his B.Sc. in
physics
in 1944 from the
University of Cape Town
and his M.Sc. in
crystallography
in 1945 from the same institution. He was a doctoral student at
Cambridge University
from 1947 to 1949, and while at Cambridge he met his future wife, Barbara Seavey, an American physics student.
[
citation needed
]
Career
[
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After marrying Barbara, he returned to the University of Cape Town in early 1950 to lecture. 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. Although he was mainly working on
particle physics
, Cormack's side interest in x-ray technology led him to develop the theoretical underpinnings of CT scanning. This work was initiated at the University of Cape Town and
Groote Schuur Hospital
in early 1956 and continued briefly in mid-1957 after returning from his sabbatical. His results were subsequently published in two papers in the Journal of Applied Physics in 1963 and 1964. These papers generated little interest until
Hounsfield
and colleagues built the first CT scanner in 1971, taking Cormack's theoretical calculations into a real application. For their independent efforts, Cormack and Hounsfield shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It is notable that the two built a very similar type of device without collaboration in different parts of the world [3]. He was member of the International Academy of Science, Munich. In 1990, he was awarded the
National Medal of Science
.
[4]
Death
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Cormack died of cancer in
Winchester, Massachusetts
, at age 74. 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.
[
citation needed
]
References
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External links
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