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In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics the strong topology on the continuous dual space of a topological vector space (TVS) X is the finest polar topology, the topology with the most open sets, on a dual pair. The coarsest polar topology is called weak topology. When the continuous dual space of a TVS X is endowed with this topology then it is called the strong dual space of X.
Let be a dual pair of vector spaces over the field of real numbers or complex numbers For any and any define
A subset is said to be bounded by a subset if for all Let denote the family of all subsets bounded by elements of ; that is, is the set of all subsets such that for every
Then the strong topology on also denoted by or simply or if the pairing is understood, is defined as the locally convex topology on generated by the seminorms of the form
In the special case when X is a locally convex space, the strong topology on the (continuous) dual space (i.e. on the space of all continuous linear functionals ) is defined as the strong topology , and it coincides with the topology of uniform convergence on bounded sets in i.e. with the topology on generated by the seminorms of the form
where runs over the family of all bounded sets in The space with this topology is called strong dual space of the space and is denoted by