The HP guys published some papers about it too, but they might be all paywalled?
That's a bit like giving da Vinci credit for the invention of the helicopter.
The Williams talk on youtube is really good. He discusses the element itself, its use in memory (as vast amounts of on-CPU memory) as well as the possibility of new CPU architectures based on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
It has been known for decades that laws of nature imply a fourth fundamental electronic element (besides resistor, capacitor and inductor).
>>> The Memristor is believed to be the missing 4th circuit element. Memristor is basically a charge-dependent resistor. The reason that the memristor is radically different from the other fundamental circuit elements is that, unlike them, it carries a memory of its past. When you turn off the voltage to the circuit, the memristor still remembers how much was applied before and for how long. That's an effect that can't be duplicated by any circuit combination of resistors, capacitors, and inductors, which is why the memristor qualifies as a fundamental circuit element. Memristors can be combined into devices called crossbar latches, which could replace transistors in future computers, taking up a much smaller area. They can also be fashioned into non-volatile solid-state memory, which would allow data density of about 100GB/1sqcm. This can be implemented for designing circuits with lesser components, lesser expenses and lesser power consumption. Also coupling the crossbar latch with FPGA (Field Processing Gate Array) technology, we can potentially make processors so dynamic that they would never get obsolete. Giving a practical solution to reduce the millions of tonnes of computer waste generated each year...[1]
I also note that the 2008 symposium talk by Leon Chua made mention of Memory Capacitors and Memory Inductors[5]. Stanley Williams started the next talk by thanking Leon for the challenge posted to systems implementers to find and use memory capacitors and memory inductors. If the missing circuit component is the memory resistor (confused with the varistor?), where do memory capacitors and memory inductors fit in?
[1] http://vixra.org/author/blaise_mouttet
[2] http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+Blaise+Mouttet/0/1/0/al...
[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328535.200-online-sp...
[4] http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/other/4236273/Memri...
Summary: Without the theoretical foundation of Chua people would have gone on for much longer finding the same concept in different guises without realizing that these were really just aspects of the same phenomenon. In addition, there are those who claim priority on HP's underlying tech and there is even a paper publishing similar experimental results as far back as the late 60s which the HP team did not cite. Again, if this was due to mere ignorance then the unifying power of theory to carve a template so that experiments did not continue to be repeated blindly strengthens the value of Chua's work. There is also criticism for the currently liberal labeling of what constitutes memristive behavior and HP is implicated in trying to do a patent landgrab.
If one person's work had to be picked as the inflection point then it would have to be Chua.
I think maybe you mean strict implication? I read a paper a few years back that showed how you can use strict implication to design regular propositional logics that can house resource sensitive logics like linear logic.