Thursday, 5 January 2012

fa.functional analysis - Difference between measures and distributions

This is a summary of what I've learned about this question based on the answers of the other commenters.



[*] Any positive distribution defines a positive Radon measure.



I had naively assumed a result for distributions like The Hahn Decomposition Theorem[1] for measures, i.e. I assumed that a distribution could be expressed as the difference of two positive distributions. If it could be, then applying Theorem [*] would yield the result that any distribution is a signed measure.



However, this is not the case. The derivative of the delta function, i.e. δ', satisfies
δ'(f) = -f'(0). This is not a measure. I can't find any way of proving it's not the difference of two positive distributions, other than by contradiction using the above result.



[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hahn_decomposition_theorem

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