Allan MacLeod Cormack

Allan MacLeod Cormack was born in South Africa on February 23, 1924, and would spend his career straddling physics and medicine in ways the credential system never anticipated. He became Professor of Physics at Tufts University, where his work on X-ray computed tomography—mathematical theory that made it possible to reconstruct cross-sectional images of the body—caught the attention of the Nobel committee. In 1979 he and Godfrey Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, a rare crossing of disciplines and a rarer feat for someone without a doctorate. He died on May 7, 1998.