One of the main achievements of 19th century mathematics was to carefully analyze concepts such as the continuity and di\ufb00erentiability of functions. Recall thatf is di\ufb00erentiable atx, and its derivative isf\ue000(x) =L, if the limit

While it was always clear that not every con- tinuous function is di\ufb00erentiable, e.g. the func- tionf :R\u2192 R given byf(x) =|x| is not dif- ferentiable at 0, it was not until the work of Bolzano and Weierstrass that the full extent of the problem became clear: there are nowhere di\ufb00erentiable continuous functions.

for suitablecj andq \u2013 e.g.q = 16,cj = 2\u2212j work. Then the sum converges to a continuous functionf , but the di\ufb00erence quotients do not have limits. In fact,u could be replaced even byu(x) = sin(2\u03c0x).

However, one can make sense off\ue000 and even the 27th derivative off forany continuousf if one relaxes the requirement thatf\ue000 be a func- tion. So, for instance, we cannot expectf\ue000 to have values at any point \u2013 it will be a distribu- tion, i.e. a \u2018generalized function\u2019, introduced by Schwartz and Sobolev.