Memristors were conceived by electrical engineer Leon Chua in
his seminal 1971 paper "Memristor--the Missing Circuit Element"
(IEEE Transactions on Circuit Theory). His peer-reviewed claim
startled electrical engineers by detailing how there was a
"missing link" in circuit theory. By mathematical necessity,
according to Chua, a fourth passive electronics component--after
resistors, capacitors and inductors--must exist. His argument
was reminiscent of the inventor of the periodic table, Russian
chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who claimed that by mathematical
necessity there were missing elements in the periodic table that
must exist. Both were right. Mendeleev's missing elements were
eventually discovered, and in 2006 Hewlett Packard Senior Fellow
Stan Williams likewise discovered Chua's missing-memristor in a
common semiconductor material. Chua called his fourth passive
circuit component a memristor, because it "remembered" the
amount of current that had recently been flowing through it by
changing its internal res