Every simplification technique on this site — K-maps, Quine-McCluskey, Petrick's method — ultimately runs on rules laid down almost a century before anyone built a circuit that needed them. The connection between the two took a specific insight to discover, and it's worth knowing the actual sequence of events rather than assuming Boolean algebra was invented for computers.
George Boole's original work
George Boole, an English mathematician, published The Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847 and expanded it in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought in 1854. His goal had nothing to do with circuits or machines — he was trying to formalize logical reasoning itself, representing statements and their combinations (AND, OR, NOT) using algebraic symbols and a strict two-value system, true or false. It was a contribution to mathematical logic and philosophy, studied for its own sake for decades afterward.
The gap: almost a century with no electrical connection
For most of that time, Boolean algebra remained a tool for logicians and mathematicians, with no particular link to electrical engineering. Switching circuits and relay systems were designed by other, more ad hoc means, without a unifying formal theory connecting circuit behavior to Boole's two-valued logic.
Claude Shannon's connection
That changed with Claude Shannon's 1937 master's thesis at MIT, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits" — often cited as one of the most consequential master's theses of the 20th century. Shannon showed that Boolean algebra describes switching circuits exactly: a switch's open/closed states map directly onto Boolean true/false, and circuits built from switches in series or parallel map directly onto AND and OR. That single realization is the entire reason Boolean algebra, rather than some other mathematical framework, became the foundation every digital circuit has been built on since.
From that insight to K-maps
Once Boolean algebra was established as the correct language for circuit design, the practical challenge became simplifying Boolean expressions efficiently by hand — which is exactly the problem Maurice Karnaugh's map method solved in 1953, building on Edward Veitch's related work from the year before. See Who Was Maurice Karnaugh? for that part of the story, and Karnaugh Map vs. Veitch Diagram for how the two names ended up describing essentially the same tool.
Why the history is worth knowing
Boolean algebra wasn't designed for circuits and only later found to be useful for logic, or the reverse — it's the other way around from what people often assume. A mathematician working purely on formal logic produced a complete, self-consistent two-valued algebra decades before anyone needed one for engineering, and it turned out to fit switching circuits perfectly once someone made the connection. Every gate, every K-map grouping, every minimized expression on this site is a direct descendant of that 19th-century work on formal reasoning, not a system invented specifically for electronics.
See the algebra itself, and the laws it's built from, in What Is Boolean Algebra? and the Boolean Algebra Laws Cheat Sheet.