Switching circuit theory provided the mathematical foundations and tools for digital system design in almost all areas of modern technology.
[1] In an 1886 letter, Charles Sanders Peirce described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits.
Walther Bothe, inventor of the coincidence circuit, got part of the 1954 Nobel Prize in physics, for the first modern electronic AND gate in 1924.
The theory was independently established through the works of NEC engineer Akira Nakashima in Japan,[8] Claude Shannon in the United States,[9] and Victor Shestakov in the Soviet Union.
[10] The three published a series of papers showing that the two-valued Boolean algebra, can describe the operation of switching circuits.