Comment by 082349872349872

1 month ago

Do I understand properly that in a different universe distributions could have been called prefunctions?

A distribution is a function, on the space of test functions.

  • OK, so if we have a distribution D (less nice than the average function) and a test function T (nicer than the average function), we have ⟨D,T⟩ = c: ℂ, so ⟨D,—⟩: test fn→ℂ and ⟨—,T⟩: distribution→ℂ ?

  • A distribution is not a function. It is a continuous linear functional on a space of functions.

    Functions define distributions, but not all distributions are defined that way, like the Dirac delta or integration over a subset.