Rigidity of the topological dual of spaces of formal series with respect to product topologies

Abstract

Even in spaces of formal power series is required a topology in order to legitimate some operations, in particular to compute infinite summations. Many topologies can be exploited for different purposes. Combinatorists and algebraists may think to usual order topologies, or the product topology induced by a discrete coefficient field, or some inverse limit topologies. Analysists will take into account the valued field structure of real or complex numbers. As the main result of this paper we prove that the topological dual spaces of formal power series, relative to the class of product topologies with respect to Hausdorff field topologies on the coefficient field, are all the same, namely the space of polynomials. As a consequence, this kind of rigidity forces linear maps, continuous for any (and then for all) of those topologies, to be defined by very particular infinite matrices similar to row-finite matrices.