A review of the applications of the Radon transform is presented, with emphasis on emission computed tomography and transmission computed tomography. The theory of the 2D and 3D Radon transforms, and the effects of attenuation for emission computed tomography are presented. The algebraic iterative methods, their importance and limitations are reviewed. Analytic solutions of the 2D problem the convolution and frequency filtering methods based on linear shift invariant theory, and the solution of the circular harmonic decomposition by integral transform theory--are reviewed. The relation between the invisible kernels, the inverse circular harmonic transform, and the consistency conditions are demonstrated. The discussion and review are extended to the 3D problem-convolution, frequency filtering, spherical harmonic transform solutions, and consistency conditions. The Cormack algorithm based on reconstruction with Zernike polynomials is reviewed. An analogous algorithm and set of reconstruction polynomials is developed for the spherical harmonic transform. The relations between the consistency conditions, boundary conditions and orthogonal basis functions for the 2D projection harmonics are delineated and extended to the 3D case. The equivalence of the inverse circular harmonic transform, the inverse Radon transform, and the inverse Cormack transform is presented. The use of the number of nodes of a projection harmonic as a filter is discussed. Numerical methods for the efficient implementation of angular harmonic algorithms based on orthogonal functions and stable recursion are presented. The derivation of a lower bound for the signal-to-noise ratio of the Cormack algorithm is derived.