Postulated in 1971, the memristor did not see the light of day until a serendipitous discovery at HP nearly four decades later. Here, I reminisce on the crisis that inspired me to develop an axiomatic nonlinear circuit theory where the memristor emerges naturally as the fourth basic circuit element.

Leon Chua is professor emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an IEEE Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award and the IEEE Gustav R. Kirchhoff Award. He has a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. He has also been awarded 17 honoris causa doctorates, named a Guggenheim fellow, and elected a member of the Academia Europaea and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Contact him at chua@berkeley.edu