Definition of "mollifier"

mollifier

noun
plural mollifiers
1. One who mollifies.
  Quotations
  […] the Lord Treasurer, who ever secretly feigned himself to be a Moderator and Mollifier of the Catholicks Afflictions […]
  1705, Henry Sheeres, A Discourse concerning the Mediterranean Sea, and the Streights of Gibraltar
2. (mathematics) An "approximation to the identity", a smooth function with special properties, used in distribution theory to create sequences of smooth functions approximating nonsmooth (generalized) functions, via convolution.
  Quotations
  I particularly remember how, at that time, I was using his mollifier method to study the zero density of L-functions and was stuck with something.
  2009, Notices of the American Mathematical Society‎, volume 56, number 6