Leon O. Chua
Filipino American electrical engineer and computer scientist
Leon Ong Chua (; 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 a Chinese-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, which he joined in 1971. He has contributed to nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural network theory and is recognized as the "Father of Nonlinear Circuit Theory" or electronic devices from nonlinear components.
He is the inventor and namesake of Chua's circuit 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. 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.
Alongside Tamas Roska, Chua also introduced the first algorithmically programmable analog cellular neural network (CNN) processor.
Early life and education
Chua was born in the Philippines on June 28, 1936, to a Hoklo Chinese family. He and his twin sister grew up as Chinese Filipinos under the reign of the Empire of Japan during World War II. His parents immigrated from Jinjiang, Southern Fujian.
In 1958, Chua earned his BS in electrical engineering from the Mapúa Institute of Technology in Manila, Philippines. He briefly taught at Mapúa for a year, before emigrating to the United States on a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned an MS in electrical engineering degree in 1961.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q93030. VIAF identifies the subject as 7559107. The Library of Congress control number is n82204052. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1971, 1958 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Leon O. Chua” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.