ca.analysis and odes - Distributions as presheaves?

While maybe not exactly what you were after, here is something that you might enjoy looking into, which relates presheaves and distributions.

There exists a category of sheaves on certain test objects, such that

• this category is a smooth topos into which the category of smooth manifolds embeds full and faithfully.




• in this topos, there exists not only a notion of infinitesimals, as in every smooth topos, but also of invertible infinitesimals, in fact, this topos provides a model for nonstandard analysis.




• Accordingly, in this topos distributions on manifolds are given by actual functions - internally in the topos.

So in a way, this topos makes precise and manifest the intuition that distributions are "generalized functions". They are functions in this topos.

The topos that I am talking about is described in great detail in section VI of the textbook Models for Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis. The test objects in this case, i.e. the objects in the site that the topos is a category of sheaves over, are smooth loci.

Distributions are discussed in section VII,3