Developers of Computer-Assisted Tomography

Allan McLeod Cormack and Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1979 for their work in the development of computer-assisted tomography (CAT).

Allan Cormack

Allan Cormack was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1924. His parents had emigrated from Scotland to South Africa shortly before World War I (1914–1918); his father was a civil servant, who worked as an engineer for the post office. The family migrated through South Africa until 1936, when they settled in Cape Town after the death of Cormack's father. Cormack attended the Rondebosch Boys High School in Cape Town, and subsequently received both bachelor's and master's degrees in physics from the University of Cape Town. However, he initially studied electrical engineering in a department headed by B. L. Goodlet, who believed that engineers needed a good grounding in physics and math. Cormack was already...