by Christopher L Vaughan (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Table of Contents (92k)
Foreword (94k)
Preface (154k)
Chapter 1: From John O'Groats to Jo'burg (6,280k)

Imagining the Elephant is a biography of Allan MacLeod Cormack, a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979 for his pioneering contributions to the development of the computer-assisted tomography (CAT) scanner, an honor he shared with Godfrey Hounsfield. A modest genius who was also a dedicated family man, the book is a celebration of Cormack's life and work. It begins with his ancestral roots in the far north of Scotland, and then chronicles his birth and early years in South Africa, his education at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Cambridge University, and his subsequent academic appointments at UCT and Tufts University in Boston, USA. It details his discovery of the problem at Cape Town in 1956, traces his scientific footsteps all the way to Stockholm in December 1979, and then extends the odyssey to his pursuits beyond the Nobel Prize.

• From John O'Groats to Jo'burg
• On the Slopes of Table Mountain
• Physics and Friends at Cambridge
• Return to the Fairest Cape
• A New Beginning in Boston
• Finding Radon and His Transform
• On the Road to Stockholm
• Citizen of the World
• At Home in Massachusetts
• Appendices:
  • Allan Cormack's Publications
  • Nobel Lecture
  • Presentation of Nobel Prize
  • Man and Science in the 21st Century
  • A Teenager's Odyssey