Maurice Karnaugh

Maurice Karnaugh (1924–2022) was an American physicist and engineer at Bell Labs who invented a beautifully visual trick for tidying up logic circuits. Faced with tangles of ANDs and ORs, he found a way to just look at the answer instead of grinding through algebra.

The masterstroke

The Karnaugh map (or "K-map") lays out all the possible inputs to a logic function on a clever grid, arranged so that neighbouring squares differ by just one bit. Simplifying then becomes a matter of drawing rings around groups of ones — a picture puzzle rather than a page of equations. Generations of electronics and computing students have learned to shrink circuits this way, making them cheaper, smaller, and faster.

Karnaugh's map is really a slick reworking of an earlier chart by Edward Veitch, which is why you'll sometimes see it called the Veitch–Karnaugh diagram. But Karnaugh's clever ordering of the rows and columns — so that adjacent cells always change by a single bit — is what made it genuinely useful, and it's his name that stuck. A reminder that in engineering, the winning idea is often a small twist on someone else's good one.