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The three elements are the capacitor, inductor and resistor.

I think when they say "fundamental elements" they mean the fundamental passive elements of analog circuit theory (mentioned above), as opposed to active elements like op-amps or transistors.

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Exactly, it says that at the top of the paragraph.

"For nearly 150 years, the known fundamental passive circuit elements were limited to the capacitor (discovered in 1745), the resistor (1827), and the inductor (1831)... He proved that memristor behavior could not be duplicated by any circuit built using only the other three elements, which is why the memristor is truly fundamental. "

Thanks, think I got it -- the passive elements can't duplicate a memristor, but transistors plus some passive elements can.

ok so the reverse is interesting - the memristor can presumably do what those "active + passive" components could have, but cheaper/smaller/faster better etc? Did I get it right?

Yes. At the moment, only smaller (the devices operate at ~1 Hz but may improve). The end hope is for very high density RAM or solid state memory (depending on how fast it ends up compared to SRAM and DRAM and Flash).

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