In functional analysis, a branch of mathematics, the strong operator topology, often abbreviated SOT, is the locally convex topology on the set of bounded operators on a Hilbert space H induced by the seminorms of the form , as x varies in H. Equivalently, it is the coarsest topology such that, for each fixed x in H, the evaluation map (taking values in H) is continuous in T. The equivalence of these two definitions can be seen by observing that a subbase for both topologies is given by the sets (where T0 is any bounded operator on H, x is any vector and ε is any positive real number).