Albert Tarantola was a Spanish-born physicist (Barcelona, June 15, 1949 — December 6, 2009), of the University of Paris (Institut de Physique du Globe), and author of the book probabilistic formulation of inverse problems (Tarantola, 1987, 2005). Tarantola was the leader of the Geophysical Tomography Group, that during the years 1985—2000 developed modern methods for the interpretation of waveform data. Apart from doing scientific research, Tarantola has taught both at his own institute in Paris and at other universities.