Maurice Karnaugh

Maurice Karnaugh
Maurice Karnaugh
Born	October 4, 1924 (age 102); New York City, U.S.
Died	November 8, 2022 (aged 98); The Bronx, New York City, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Physicist, mathematician, computer scientist, innovator
Years active	1952–1994
Known for	Karnaugh map

Maurice Karnaugh (; October 4, 1924 – November 8, 2022) was a distinguished American physicist, mathematician, computer scientist, and innovator, best recognized for creating the Karnaugh map, a tool widely utilized in Boolean algebra simplification.

Early life and education

Karnaugh completed his undergraduate studies in physics at City College of New York in 1948, earning a B.A. He then pursued doctoral research at Yale University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in physics in 1952. His dissertation focused on The Theory of Magnetic Resonance and Lambda-Type Doubling in Nitric-Oxide.

Career

From 1952 until 1993, Karnaugh held positions at both Bell Labs and IBM. During his tenure at Bell Labs (1952–1966), he introduced the Karnaugh map in 1954 and was granted patents concerning PCM encoding techniques, magnetic logic devices, and coding methodologies. Subsequently, he joined IBM’s Federal Systems Division located in Gaithersburg (1966–1970) before transitioning to the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center (1970–1994), where his work concentrated on multistage interconnection networks.

In recognition of his contributions, Karnaugh was named an IEEE Fellow in 1976. Additionally, he served as an adjunct professor in computer science at the Polytechnic University of New York (currently known as New York University Tandon School of Engineering) from 1980 through 1999.

Karnaugh Map

During his period at Bell Labs in 1953, Karnaugh devised a logic diagram technique known as the Karnaugh map, providing a novel graphical approach to simplify Boolean functions.

Personal life and death

Karnaugh was married to Linn Blank Weil from 1970 until his passing in 2022. From a previous marriage, he had two sons: Robert Victor Karnaugh and Paul Joseph Karnaugh.

He passed away at the age of 98 on November 8, 2022, in The Bronx.

Publications

Karnaugh, Maurice. "The Map Method for Synthesis of Combinational Logic Circuits." Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, Part I: Communication and Electronics, vol. 72, no. 5, Nov. 1953, pp. 593–599.
Karnaugh, Maurice. "Issues in Computer Communications." IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 20, no. 3, June 1972, pp. 495–498.
Karnaugh, Maurice. "A New Class of Algorithms for Multipoint Network Optimization." IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. 24, no. 5, May 1976, pp. 500–505.
Karnaugh, Maurice. "Generalized quicksearch for expert systems." Eighth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Applications, March 1992, pp. 30–34.
Karnaugh, Maurice. "Symbolic Sets and the Real Line." symbolicsets.com, Jan. 2017 (61 pages).

External links

List of publications at ACM Digital Library