Leon Chua

Leon Chua is a circuit theorist and electrical engineer who was born in 1936 in the Philippines and grew up with his twin sister in a Chinese Filipino community. He took a bachelor degree in electrical engineering at the Mapua Institute of Technology in 1959, a master degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, and a doctorate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964, with a thesis on the parametric approach to nonlinear network analysis. He taught at Purdue University from 1964 to 1970 and then joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. The Engineering and Technology History Wiki describes him as widely recognized as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and of cellular neural networks, a chip architecture aimed at very fast pattern recognition and image processing. He also invented a five-element circuit that generates chaotic signals, known as the Chua Circuit, which researchers use in designing secure communication systems based on chaos. An IEEE Fellow and a past president of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, he holds nine honorary doctorates and several IEEE awards, including the Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award in 2005.