Future directions

In this chapter, we address the question: “Where do we go from here?” In the short term, we have the immediate concern of creating a set of devices with long effective lifetimes that can be put in production for broad commercial and industrial use. A next step could be the development of a device with dynamical order so that the fractional-order can be tuned on a real-time basis. Such development could lead to a generalization of Ohm’s law to include nonlinear memory devices. This all represents a huge array of challenges that will require skills across the broadest possible range of subject matter. To achieve this end, we need to incorporate fractional-order analysis into mainstream education, not just for the sake of fractional calculus, but to introduce the general population to the full power of the methods to addressing complex problems.