in vary by a bounded amount, then so do and To make sense of specifying the amount a scalar changes, the field also has to carry a topology in this context; a common choice are the reals or the complex numbers. In such topological vector spaces one can consider series of vectors. The infinite sum denotes the limit of the corresponding finite partial sums of the sequence of elements of For example, the could be (real or complex) functions belonging to some function space in which case the series is a function series. The mode of convergence of the series depends on the topology imposed on the function space. In such cases, pointwise convergence and uniform convergence are two prominent examples. A way to ensure the existence of limits of certain infinite series is to restrict attention to spaces where any Cauchy sequence has a limit; such a vector space is called complete. Roughly, a vector space is complete provided that it contains all necessary limits. For example, the vector space of polynomials on the unit interval equipped with the topology of uniform convergence is not complete because any continuous function on can be uniformly approximated by a sequence of polynomials, by the Weierstrass approximation theorem. In contrast, the space of all continuous functions on with the same topology is complete. A norm gives rise to a topology by defining that a sequence of vectors converges to if and only if Banach and Hilbert spaces are complete topological vector spaces whose topologies are given, respectively, by a norm and an inner product. Their study—a key piece of functional analysis—focuses on infinite-dimensional vector spaces, since all norms on finite-dimensional topological vector spaces give rise to the same notion of convergence. The image at the right shows the equivalence of the -norm and -norm on as the unit "balls" enclose each other, a sequence converges to zero in one norm if and only if it so does in the other norm. In the infinite-dimensional case, however, there will generally be inequivalent topologies, which makes the study of topological vector spaces richer than that of vector spaces without additional data. From a conceptual point of view, all notions related to topological vector spaces should match the topology. For example, instead of considering all linear maps (also called functionals) maps between topological vector spaces are required to be continuous. In particular, the (topological) dual