Talk:Fundamental solution

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[edit] The notion of fundamental solution predates distribution theory

See this 1940 paper by Dressel [1], which references a 1911 paper by Hadamard. The concept of fundamental solution for the heat equation at least was in use long before Schwartz invented distribution theory in the 1940s. Certainly the discovery of distributions shed a lot of light on the subject of fundamental solutions, but it may be worthwhile to convey the older intuition as well. Perturbationist (talk) 03:47, 21 March 2008 (UTC)