Is there a norm so that the differentiation operator is continuous ?
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Note that differentiation is linear, so the continuity of differentiation is equivalent to continuity at 0 (here, the 0 of the vector space , that is, the constant function equal to 0). In other words: for every , there would exist a , such that for every function of class satisfying , we would have .
However, this is false for any norm. To see this, it is enough to find functions such that is arbitrarily larger than . Natural candidates are the functions . Indeed, we have:
Now, if we take , and fix , the problem with the functions is that their norm is not necessarily less than or equal to .
We can therefore simply normalize them and multiply by so that this is the case: we define
and automatically their norm is exactly ; moreover, we still have the condition .
By taking , we therefore obtain but , which contradicts continuity.
