Hyperfunction

In mathematics, hyperfunctions are generalizations of functions, as a 'jump' from one holomorphic function to another at a boundary, and can be thought of informally as distributions of infinite order. Hyperfunctions were introduced by Mikio Sato in 1958, building upon earlier work by Grothendieck and others. In Japan, they are usually called the Sato's hyperfunctions.

A hyperfunction on the real line can be conceived of as the 'difference' between one holomorphic function defined on the upper half-plane and another on the lower half-plane. That is, a hyperfunction is specified by a pair (f, g), where f is a holomorphic function on the upper half-plane and g is a holomorphic function on the lower half-plane.

Informally, the hyperfunction is what the difference ${\displaystyle f-g}$ would be at the real line itself. This difference is not affected by adding the same holomorphic function to both f and g, so if h is a holomorphic function on the whole complex plane, the hyperfunctions (f, g) and (f + h, g + h) are defined to be equivalent.

The motivation can be concretely implemented using ideas from sheaf cohomology. Let ${\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}}$ be the sheaf of holomorphic functions on ${\displaystyle \mathbb {C} .}$ Define the hyperfunctions on the real line as the first local cohomology group:

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