The Prehistory of the Theory of Distributions

I first learned the theory of distributions from Professor Ebbe Thue Poulsen in an undergraduate course at Aarhus University. Both his lectures and the textbook, Topological Vector Spaces, Distributions and Kernels by F. Treves, used in the course, opened my eyes to the beauty and abstract simplicity of the theory. However my incomplete study of many branches of classical analysis left me with the question: Why is the theory of distributions important? In my continued studies this question was g…