McColl and Minimization |
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| Authors: | Frank Markham Brown |
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| Affiliation: | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , Air Force Institute of Technology , Dayton, Ohio, USA |
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| Abstract: | In 1952, Quine showed that the problem of reducing a propositional formula to a simplest normal equivalent can be solved in two steps, viz., (i) express the given formula, Φ, equivalently as the disjunction of all its prime implicants, and (ii) find all non-redundant disjunctions of the latter that are equivalent to Φ (Quine 1952 Quine, W. V. 1952. ‘The problem of simplifying truth functions’. American Mathematical Monthly, 59: 521–531. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). However, it seems not generally known that an ingenious form of the same two-step process was published by Hugh McColl in 1878. |
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