MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).

## Return to Answer

2 added 78 characters in body

Matthew's answer reminded me of a fact that makes this easy: if $X$ is a normed space (say, over $\mathbb{R}$) and $f : X \to \mathbb{R}$ is a linear functional, then its kernel $\ker f$ is either closed or dense in $X$, depending on whether or not $f$ is continuous (i.e. bounded). The proof is trivial: $\ker f$ is a subspace of $X$ of codimension 1. Its closure is a subspace that contains it, so must either be $\ker f$ or $X$. And of course, a linear functional is continuous iff its kernel is closed. This is Proposition III.5.2 III.5.2-3 in Conway's A Course in Functional Analysis.

So let $f$ be an unbounded linear functional on $X$ (which one can always construct as in Matthew's example), and take $D = \ker f$. $D$ is dense by the above fact, and $f$ is identically zero on $D$.

1

Matthew's answer reminded me of a fact that makes this easy: if $X$ is a normed space (say, over $\mathbb{R}$) and $f : X \to \mathbb{R}$ is a linear functional, then its kernel $\ker f$ is either closed or dense in $X$, depending on whether or not $f$ is continuous (i.e. bounded). The proof is trivial: $\ker f$ is a subspace of $X$ of codimension 1. Its closure is a subspace that contains it, so must either be $\ker f$ or $X$. This is Proposition III.5.2 in Conway's A Course in Functional Analysis.

So let $f$ be an unbounded linear functional on $X$ (which one can always construct as in Matthew's example), and take $D = \ker f$. $D$ is dense by the above fact, and $f$ is identically zero on $D$.