Abstract
New definitions for fractional integro-differential operators are presented and referred to as delayed fractional operators. It is shown that delayed fractional derivatives give rise to the notion of functional order differentiation. Functional differentiation can be used to establish dualities and asymptotic mixtures between unrelated theories, something that conventional fractional or integer operators cannot do. In this paper, dualities and asymptotic mixtures are established between arbitrary functions, probability densities, the Gibbs–Shannon entropy and Hellinger distance, as well as higher-dimensional particle geometries in quantum mechanics.