A memristor is a passive two-terminal electronic component for which the resistance (dV/dI) depends in some way on the amount of charge that has flowed through the circuit. When current flows in one direction through the device, the resistance increases; and when current flows in the opposite direction, the resistance decreases. When the current is stopped, the component retains the last resistance that it had, and when the flow of charge starts again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active.
Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua in a 1971 paper. Leon Chua is to circuit theory as Einstien is to relativity. Thirty-seven years after he predicted the memristor, a working solid-state memristor was created by a team led by R. Stanley Williams at Hewlett Packard. Here's an informative video of R. Stanley Williams giving a keynote presentation on memristor technology at the UC San Diego Center for Networked System's Winter Research Review 2010.
In 2009, Massimiliano Di Ventra, Yuriy Pershin and Leon Chua co-wrote an article extending the notion of memristive systems to capacitive and inductive elements in the form of memcapacitors and meminductors whose properties depend on the state and history of the system.
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