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Leon O. Chua receives the 2020 Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics

American electrical engineer and computer scientist honored for his breakthrough research on memristors and memristive systems, and his lifetime achievements in nanoelectronics, nonlinear networks, nonlinear dynamics, chaos and computational biology

Heidelberg | New York, 25 February 2020 

Leon O. Chua © Leon O. ChuaThe 2020 Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics will be awarded to Leon O. Chua, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in the US. Chua’s work spans fields from nanoelectronics to nonlinear circuits and systems, robotics and computational biology, and over his long career his papers have been cited around 80,000 times. He will be presented with this award, which comes with a prize of US$5,000, at the Magnus-Haus in Berlin, Germany on 18 September 2020. The award ceremony will also include a public lecture held by Chua. 

As an internationally renowned electronic engineer and computer scientist, Chua has worked on a wide spectrum of topics including cellular neural and nonlinear networks, nanoelectronics, nonlinear circuits and systems, nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. In 1971 he postulated a passive electrical component called a “memristor”, which a team at Hewlett Packard later confirmed experimentally in 2008. Throughout his career Chua has been the recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates. He has been selected for this year’s Julius Springer Award for Applied Physics because of his lifetime contribution to his field. 

The Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics recognizes researchers who have made an outstanding and innovative contribution to the field of applied physics. It has been awarded annually since 1998 by the editors-in-chief of the Springer journals Applied Physics A – Materials Science & Processing and Applied Physics B – Lasers and Optics. Recent winners have included Roland Wiesendanger, Xiang Zhang, Viktor Malka, Guus Rijnders and Jerome Faist.

Thomas Lippert, Editor-in-Chief of Applied Physics A said: “Leon O Chua is highly deserving of the Julius Springer Prize. Alongside several fundamental discoveries such as the memristor, and the invention of a circuit that is one of the first and most widely known to exhibit chaotic behaviour, Chua has contributed to various fields, from nonlinear systems to cellular neural networks. To cover such a range of topics is extraordinary.”

Further Information

About Applied Physics A and Applied Physics B

Find out more about Leon Chua’s work in the following articles published in Applied Physics A and other Springer Nature titles: 

Microtubules as Sub-Cellular Memristors Scientific Reports, 10(1): 2108 (2020) 

Information can be stored in the human skin memristor which has non-volatile memory Scientific Reports, 9: 19260 (2019) 

If It’s Pinched It’s a Memristor in Handbook of Memristor Networks, pp 15-88, Springer (2019)

Memristor, Hodgkin-Huxley, and Edge of Chaos in Handbook of Memristor Networks, pp 287-313, Springer (2019)

Morris-Lecar model of third-order barnacle muscle fiber is made of volatile memristors Science China Information Sciences 61: 060426 (2018)

Five non-volatile memristor enigmas solved Applied Physics A, 124:563 (2018)

Memristor Emulators: A Note on Modeling, A. Ascoli, R. Tetzlaff, L. O. Chua, W. Yi, R. S. Williams, chapter in Advances in Memristors, Memristive Devices and Systems, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 701, 1-17 (2017)

The Fourth Element Andrew Adamatzky, Leon Chua (Eds.), Memristor Networks, 1-13 (2014)

The Universe as Automaton, From Simplicity and Symmetry to Complexity Klaus Mainzer and Leon Chua, SpringerBriefs in Complexity (2012)

Two centuries of memristors Nature Materials 11(6), 478-481 (2012)

Resistance switching memories are memristors Applied Physics A 102:4 765-783 (2011)

Practical Numerical Algorithms for Chaotic Systems Thomas S. Parker and Leon O. Chua, Springer-Verlag, NY (1989)

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