A hyperfunction on the real line can be conceived of as the 'difference' between one holomorphic function defined on the upper half-plane and another on the lower half-plane. That is, a hyperfunction is specified by a pair (f, g), where f is a holomorphic function on the upper half-plane and g is a holomorphic function on the lower half-plane.
Informally, the hyperfunction is what the difference f − g {\displaystyle f-g} would be at the real line itself. This difference is not affected by adding the same holomorphic function to both f and g, so if h is a holomorphic function on the whole complex plane, the hyperfunctions (f, g) and (f + h, g + h) are defined to be equivalent.
The motivation can be concretely implemented using ideas from sheaf cohomology. Let O {\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}} be the sheaf of holomorphic functions on C . {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} .} Define the hyperfunctions on the real line as the first local cohomology group:
Concretely, let C + {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} ^{+}} and C − {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} ^{-}} be the upper half-plane and lower half-plane respectively. Then C + ∪ C − = C ∖ R {\displaystyle \mathbb {C} ^{+}\cup \mathbb {C} ^{-}=\mathbb {C} \setminus \mathbb {R} } so
Since the zeroth cohomology group of any sheaf is simply the global sections of that sheaf, we see that a hyperfunction is a pair of holomorphic functions one each on the upper and lower complex halfplane modulo entire holomorphic functions.
More generally one can define B ( U ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {B}}(U)} for any open set U ⊆ R {\displaystyle U\subseteq \mathbb {R} } as the quotient H 0 ( U ~ ∖ U , O ) / H 0 ( U ~ , O ) {\displaystyle H^{0}({\tilde {U}}\setminus U,{\mathcal {O}})/H^{0}({\tilde {U}},{\mathcal {O}})} where U ~ ⊆ C {\displaystyle {\tilde {U}}\subseteq \mathbb {C} } is any open set with U ~ ∩ R = U {\displaystyle {\tilde {U}}\cap \mathbb {R} =U} . One can show that this definition does not depend on the choice of U ~ {\displaystyle {\tilde {U}}} giving another reason to think of hyperfunctions as "boundary values" of holomorphic functions.
Let U ⊆ R {\displaystyle U\subseteq \mathbb {R} } be any open subset.