Maurice Karnaugh is an American physicist, famous for the Karnaugh map

Karnaugh map

The Karnaugh map , Maurice Karnaugh's 1953 refinement of Edward Veitch's 1952 Veitch diagram, is a method to simplify Boolean algebra expressions...

 used in Boolean algebra.

He studied mathematics and physics at City College of New York

City College of New York

The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...

 (1944-48) and transferred to Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 to complete his B.Sc. (1949), M.Sc. (1950) and Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 in physics with a thesis on
The Theory of Magnetic Resonance and Lambda-Type Doubling in Nitric-Oxide (1952).

Karnaugh worked at Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 (1952-66), developing the Karnaugh map (1954) as well as patents for PCM encoding and magnetic logic circuits and coding.
He later worked at IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

's Federal Systems Division in Gaithersburg (1966-70) and at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center (1970-89), studying multistage interconnection networks

Multistage interconnection networks

Multistage interconnection networks are a class of high-speed computer networks usually composed of processing elements on one end of the network and memory elements on the other end, connected together by switching elements...

.

Karnaugh was elected an IEEE Fellow

IEEE Fellow

An IEEE member is elevated to the grade of IEEE Fellow for "unusual distinction in the profession and shall be conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest"...

 (1976), and had an adjunct position
at Polytechnic University of New York

Polytechnic University of New York

The Polytechnic Institute of New York University, often referred to as Polytechnic Institute of NYU, NYU Polytechnic, or NYU-Poly, is the engineering and applied sciences affiliate of New York University...

at the Westchester campus (1980-1999). Maurice has been married to the former Linn Blank Weil since 1970. He has two grown sons, Robert and Paul from his first marriage.

Publications

• The Map Method for Synthesis of Combinational Logic Circuits, Trans. AIEE. pt I, 72(9):593-599, November 1953
• A New Class of Algorithms for Multipoint Network Optimization, IEEE Trans. Comm., May 1976, pp. 505–505
• Issues in Computer Communications, IEEE Trans. Comm., pp. 495–498, 1972
• Generalized quicksearch for expert systems, in Proc. Artificial Intelligence for Applications, pp. 30–34. 1992