Talk:Sergei Sobolev

The theory of distributions is considered now as the calculus of the modern epoch.
This sentence, which is currently in the Sobolev article, doesn't sound right to me. Certainly distributions are very important in some areas of partial differential equations and topological vector spaces etc. But they are not currently taught to undergraduates as the new standard way to do calculus.

Maybe this article should have a bit more summary of the main properties and characteristics of Sobolev spaces, although the article on that subject is quite detailed. The idea that a function can be half-differentiable, for example, is so novel that it could be mentioned in this article about the person Sobolev. --Alan U. Kennington (talk) 16:15, 9 April 2015 (UTC)


 * That's why "the calculus of the modern epoch". Of course they aren't generally taught to undergraduates. Neither is ordinary calculus taught to primary school pupils. (Likewise, noone doubts that set theory is the basis of modern mathematics; but while it is introduced in undergraduate mathematics, this is usually little more than notation, and more specific study of set theory is very much a graduate matter.) - That being said, while it is of debate whether German universities are, technically, undergraduate or graduate institutes (the Gymnasium having quite a bit of the role of college); but most generally, a bachelor's study is considered undergraduate, and I did hear distribution theory in my bachelor's (albeit as a self-chosen seminar).--2001:4CA0:2FFF:11:0:0:0:145 (talk) 13:23, 20 October 2017 (UTC)