 In 1994, Kauffman and Tom Etter wrote a draft proposal for a non-commutative "discrete ordered calculus" (DOC), which they presented in revised form in 1996.In the meantime, the theory was presented in a modified form by Kauffman and H. Pierre Noyes together with a presentation of a derivation of free space Maxwell's equations on this basis.He won a Lester R. Ford Award (with Thomas Banchoff) in 1978.