Nuclear space

In mathematics, nuclear spaces are topological vector spaces that can be viewed as a generalization of finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces and share many of their desirable properties. Nuclear spaces are however quite different from Hilbert spaces, another generalization of finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces. They were introduced by Alexander Grothendieck.

The topology on nuclear spaces can be defined by a family of seminorms whose unit balls decrease rapidly in size. Vector spaces whose elements are "smooth" in some sense tend to be nuclear spaces; a typical example of a nuclear space is the set of smooth functions on a compact manifold. All finite-dimensional vector spaces are nuclear. There are no Banach spaces that are nuclear, except for the finite-dimensional ones. In practice a sort of converse to this is often true: if a "naturally occurring" topological vector space is not a Banach space, then there is a good chance that it is nuclear.