History
The theory of interpolation of vector spaces began by an observation of Józef Marcinkiewicz, later generalized and now known as the Riesz-Thorin theorem. In simple terms, if a linear function is continuous on a certain space Lp and also on a certain space Lq, then it is also continuous on the space Lr, for any intermediate r between p and q. In other words, Lr is a space which is intermediate between Lp and Lq.
In the development of Sobolev spaces, it became clear that the trace spaces were not any of the usual function spaces (with integer number of derivatives), and Jacques-Louis Lions discovered that indeed these trace spaces were constituted of functions that have a noninteger degree of differentiability.
Many methods were designed to generate such spaces of functions, including the Fourier transform, complex interpolation, real interpolation, as well as other tools (see e.g. fractional derivative).
Read more about this topic: Interpolation Space
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