Inmathematics, afunction space is aset offunctions between two fixed sets. Often, thedomain and/orcodomain will have additionalstructure which is inherited by the function space. For example, the set of functions from any setX into avector space has anatural vector space structure given bypointwise addition and scalar multiplication. In other scenarios, the function space might inherit atopological ormetric structure, hence the name functionspace.
LetF be afield and letX be any set. The functionsX →F can be given the structure of a vector space overF where the operations are defined pointwise, that is, for anyf,g :X →F, anyx inX, and anyc inF, defineWhen the domainX has additional structure, one might consider instead thesubset (orsubspace) of all such functions which respect that structure. For example, ifV and alsoX itself are vector spaces overF, the set oflinear mapsX →V form a vector space overF with pointwise operations (often denotedHom(X,V)). One such space is thedual space ofX: the set oflinear functionalsX →F with addition and scalar multiplication defined pointwise.
Intopology, one may attempt to put a topology on the space of continuous functions from atopological spaceX to another oneY, with utility depending on the nature of the spaces. A commonly used example is thecompact-open topology, e.g.loop space. Also available is theproduct topology on the space of set theoretic functions (i.e. not necessarily continuous functions)YX. In this context, this topology is also referred to as thetopology of pointwise convergence.
In the theory ofstochastic processes, the basic technical problem is how to construct aprobability measure on a function space ofpaths of the process (functions of time);
Functional analysis is organized around adequate techniques to bring function spaces astopological vector spaces within reach of the ideas that would apply tonormed spaces of finite dimension. Here we use the real line as an example domain, but the spaces below exist on suitable open subsets