Support (mathematics)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Support" mathematics – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In mathematics, the support of a real-valued function ${\displaystyle f}$ is the subset of the function domain containing the elements which are not mapped to zero. If the domain of ${\displaystyle f}$ is a topological space, then the support of ${\displaystyle f}$ is instead defined as the smallest closed set containing all points not mapped to zero. This concept is used widely in mathematical analysis.