Bump function

In mathematics, a bump function (also called a test function) is a function ${\displaystyle f:\mathbb {R} ^{n}\to \mathbb {R} }$ on a Euclidean space ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}}$ which is both smooth (in the sense of having continuous derivatives of all orders) and compactly supported. The set of all bump functions with domain ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}}$ forms a vector space, denoted ${\displaystyle \mathrm {C} _{0}^{\infty }(\mathbb {R} ^{n})}$ or ${\displaystyle \mathrm {C} _{\mathrm {c} }^{\infty }(\mathbb {R} ^{n}).}$ The dual space of this space endowed with a suitable topology is the space of distributions.