Leon O. Chua | |
|---|---|
 Chua at the NOLTA Symposium in 1993 | |
| Born | Leon Ong Chua June 28, 1936 |
| Nationality | Hoklo / American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | Mapúa Institute of Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign |
| Known for | |
| Children | 4, including Amy |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electrical engineering Electronics and communication engineering Computer science |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
| Thesis | Nonlinear network analysis -- the parametric approach[1] |
| Doctoral advisor | Mac Van Valkenburg[1] |
| Notable students | |
Leon Ong Chua (/ˈtʃwɑː/; Chinese: 蔡少棠; pinyin: Cài Shǎotáng; Wade–Giles: Ts'ai Shao-t'ang; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Chhòa Siáu-tông; born June 28, 1936) is an American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is a professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1971. He has contributed to nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural network theory.[2]
He is the inventor and namesake of Chua's circuit[3] one of the first and most widely known circuits to exhibit chaotic behavior, and was the first to conceive the theories behind, and postulate the existence of, the memristor.[4] Thirty-seven years after he predicted its existence, a working solid-state memristor was created by a team led by R. Stanley Williams at Hewlett Packard.[5][6]
Alongside Tamas Roska, Chua also introduced the first algorithmically programmable analog cellular neural network (CNN) processor.[7]
A first-generation Filipino-Chinese-American, Chua and his twin sister grew up as members of the Hokkien Chinese ethnic minority in the Philippines[8] under the reign of the Empire of Japan during World War II. Of Hoklo ancestry, his parents immigrated from Jinjiang, Southern Fujian province.[9] In 1959, he earned his BSEE degree from Mapúa Institute of Technology in Manila, Philippines. He briefly taught at Mapúa for a year,[10] before emigrating to the United States on a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned an MSEE degree in 1961. He then earned a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1964. His PhD thesis was entitled Nonlinear Network Analysis—The Parametric Approach. Over the ensuing years, he has received eight honorary doctorates.
Chua has four daughters; the eldest, Amy Chua (a professor of law at Yale University[8]), Katrin (a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University), Cynthia (Cindy, a Special Olympics Gold medalist), and Michelle (a Yale Law School graduate). In addition to his four daughters, Chua has seven grandchildren.[11][12]
Chua was a member of the faculty at Purdue University from 1964 to 1970 before joining Berkeley in 1971. His current research interests include cellular neural networks, nonlinear networks, nonlinear circuits and systems, nonlinear dynamics, bifurcation theory, and chaos theory. He was the editor of The International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos[13] until 2009, and is now the honorary editor.
