The Chua Lectures

This 4-volume compendium contains the verbatim hard copies of all color slides from the Chua Lecture Series presented at HP in Palo Alto, during the period from September 22 to November 24, 2015. Each lecture consists of 90 minutes, divided into a formal lecture, a discussion session, and an Encore of special trivia that the audience found mesmerizing.These lectures share some unique features of the classic Feynman Lectures on Physics, as much of the materials are presented in the unique style of the author, and the content is original as discovered or invented by the author himself. Unlike most technical books that suffer a notoriously short life span as their features could be superseded by superior models, this series of Chua lectures are intended to never be obsolete — many concepts and principles introduced are in fact new laws of nature, written in the language of sophomore-level mathematics, providing the foundation and the elan vital for initiating and nurturing future concepts and inventions.Volume I — covers everything that a researcher may want to know about memristors but is too afraid to ask.Volume II — shows that memristors can be either volatile or non-volatile, and effectively proving that synapses are non-volatile memristors, while action potentials are generated by locally-active memristors.Volume III — presents an overview of the fascinating phenomenon called chaos, while immersing the audience with the sights and sound of chaos from the Chua Circuit, invented in 1984 by Leon Chua, and has now become the standard textbook example of chaos exhibited by a real nonlinear electronic circuit, and not by computer simulations.Volume IV — surprises the audience with a new law of nature — dubbed the local activity principle, as discovered and proved mathematically in 1996 by Leon Chua. In particular, a Corollary of Chua's local activity theorem, dubbed the edge of chaos, is shown via insightful examples to be the originator of most complex phenomena, including intelligence, creativity, and deep learning. The edge of chaos is Mother Nature's tool for overcoming the tyranny of the second law of thermodynamics by providing an escape hatch for entropy to decrease over time. Indeed, the local activity principle which is profusely illustrated in the final volume, is widely recognized as a new law of thermodynamics, and is identified as the sine qua non of all complex phenomena, including life itself.