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I am familiar with the weak topology and a linear functional on a Banach space being weakly continuous, but in PDE I often see a statement along the lines of "$f$ is a weakly continuous solution to the PDE" or "$f$ is a weakly continuous map from the interval $(0,T)$ to $X$" where $X$ is some appropriate function space (usually Hilbert or Banach). What is the precise definition of weakly continuous here?

One definition I thought of is that this means $f$ is continuous with respect to the weak topology on $(0,T)$ and the weak topology on $X$ (i.e. weak-weak continuity). I saw a few older questions asking something similar and the answers are all in terms of convergence, i.e. $f$ is weakly continuous if whenever $x_n \rightarrow x$ weakly then $f(x_n) \rightarrow f(x)$ weakly. But as others pointed out, this is stronger than $f$ being weakly continuous and in fact states that $f$ is sequentially continuous.

CBBAM
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  • What do you mean by weak topology on $(0,T)$? 2. Yes, you have to distinguish between weakly continuous and weakly sequentially continuous maps.
  • – geetha290krm Jan 21 '24 at 11:05
  • @geetha290krm I was considering $(0,T)$ as a subspace of $\mathbb{R}$ but now that I think about it this will not work since $(0,T)$ is not a vector subspace. In this case how do you define weakly continuous independent of weakly sequentially continuous? – CBBAM Jan 21 '24 at 11:11