Difference operators, distributions and functional equations (Q1192291)

The theory of distributions of Laurent Schwartz has been used by I. Fenyö, Y. Aczél, A. M. Garsia, E. L. Koh and others to solve certain types of difference equations. The main aim of the present paper is to introduce a new distributional method, based on approximating distributional derivatives by differences, which allows one to find the distributional solutions to distributional analogues of many functional equations by reduction to differential equations. This method allows one to find all the continuous or even locally Lebesgue integrable solutions of functional equations such as the cosine equation, the mean value functional equation and others.