xii
Foreword by R. Stanley Williams
work. He gracefully accepted and devoted a huge amount of work into organizing
and presenting the twelve-part series “The Chua Lectures: From Memristors and
Cellular Nonlinear Networks to the Edge of Chaos,” which is available on YouTube.
During the lectures, the interesting topic of a Hamiltonian approach to electronic
circuits that was based on flux and charge came up, which I found to be fascinating
but had no bandwidth to pursue myself.
I was thus delighted when Fernando Corinto presented a copy of this book and
asked me to provide some remarks for a preface. I started to read it and felt a
warm glow through the first four introductory chapters. I had just finished teaching
a graduate-level class for electrical engineers on nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and
those chapters with their excellent figures cemented home the concepts that I had
been trying to help my students learn. Just one example is the discussion of impasse
points and how (and why) to break them. I wish I had the book before I taught the
class, because the choice of topics and the presentation were ideal—much better
than what I have found elsewhere in texts or papers and certainly better than my
lecture notes. Then I began with chapter five, which is the inception of the core of
the book. I was both challenged and intrigued as I continued to read. It took me
quite a long time to finish the book, not because of lack of interest but rather I kept
coming up with completely new ideas for experiments that I wanted to develop,
which included designing special-purpose circuits and apparatus for performing
measurements. Building a charge and flux meter, musing about the implications of
Noether’s theorems for electronic circuits, and analyzing a coupled oscillator circuit
for computing were just a few of the projects I investigated. I spent a lot of time on
these pursuits and had great fun in the process—at this stage, it is hard to know if
any of my concepts will work, but I am excited by the prospects. As I write this, I am
in a mode where my lab is closed because of the COVID-19 epidemic, but I hope to
start work on the ideas inspired by this book as soon as possible. Nonlinear Circuits
and Systems with Memristors has reinforced much that I have previously learned
and taught, and it has also challenged me to consider the new ways of thinking
about how to understand and even measure the properties of nonlinear dynamical
systems. It is not the final elucidation of the field, but rather a portal and invitation
to explore new opportunities.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
R. Stanley Williams
Texas A&M University
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Bryan, College Station, TX, USA
Company Chair Professor
May 13, 2020
Foreword by R. Stanley Williams
work. He gracefully accepted and devoted a huge amount of work into organizing
and presenting the twelve-part series “The Chua Lectures: From Memristors and
Cellular Nonlinear Networks to the Edge of Chaos,” which is available on YouTube.
During the lectures, the interesting topic of a Hamiltonian approach to electronic
circuits that was based on flux and charge came up, which I found to be fascinating
but had no bandwidth to pursue myself.
I was thus delighted when Fernando Corinto presented a copy of this book and
asked me to provide some remarks for a preface. I started to read it and felt a
warm glow through the first four introductory chapters. I had just finished teaching
a graduate-level class for electrical engineers on nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and
those chapters with their excellent figures cemented home the concepts that I had
been trying to help my students learn. Just one example is the discussion of impasse
points and how (and why) to break them. I wish I had the book before I taught the
class, because the choice of topics and the presentation were ideal—much better
than what I have found elsewhere in texts or papers and certainly better than my
lecture notes. Then I began with chapter five, which is the inception of the core of
the book. I was both challenged and intrigued as I continued to read. It took me
quite a long time to finish the book, not because of lack of interest but rather I kept
coming up with completely new ideas for experiments that I wanted to develop,
which included designing special-purpose circuits and apparatus for performing
measurements. Building a charge and flux meter, musing about the implications of
Noether’s theorems for electronic circuits, and analyzing a coupled oscillator circuit
for computing were just a few of the projects I investigated. I spent a lot of time on
these pursuits and had great fun in the process—at this stage, it is hard to know if
any of my concepts will work, but I am excited by the prospects. As I write this, I am
in a mode where my lab is closed because of the COVID-19 epidemic, but I hope to
start work on the ideas inspired by this book as soon as possible. Nonlinear Circuits
and Systems with Memristors has reinforced much that I have previously learned
and taught, and it has also challenged me to consider the new ways of thinking
about how to understand and even measure the properties of nonlinear dynamical
systems. It is not the final elucidation of the field, but rather a portal and invitation
to explore new opportunities.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
R. Stanley Williams
Texas A&M University
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Bryan, College Station, TX, USA
Company Chair Professor
May 13, 2020