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]
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.
IEEE Browder J. Thompson Memorial Prize Award (1967) [16]
IEEE Guillemin-Cauer Award (1972, 1985, 1989) [17]
IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award (1973), for the paper "Memristor: The Missing Circuit Element" in IEEE TRANSACTIONS on Circuit Theory, September 1971[18]
IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award (2005), For seminal contributions to the foundation of nonlinear circuit theory, and for inventing Chua's Circuit and Cellular Networks, each spawning a new research area.[20]
M. E. Van Valkenburg Award (1995 and 1998)
IEEE Circuits and Systems SocietyVitold Belevitch Award (2007), For seminal contributions to nonlinear circuit theory, the first mathematically proven physical implementation of Chaos (Chua circuit), the local activity principle as the root of complexity, the cellular neural/nonlinear network principle and basic theory, and the qualitative theory of complexity in 1D cellular automata.[21]
^Roska, T.; Chua, L.O. (March 1993). "The CNN universal machine: an analogic array computer". IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Analog and Digital Signal Processing. 40 (3): 163–173. doi:10.1109/82.222815.