THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE: VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Avi Wigderson*, Yuval Wigderson

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

We show how a number of well-known uncertainty principles for the Fourier transform, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the Donoho–Stark uncertainty principle, and Meshulam’s nonabelian uncertainty principle, have little to do with the structure of the Fourier transform itself. Rather, all of these results follow from very weak properties of the Fourier transform (shared by numerous linear operators), namely that it is bounded as an operator L1 → L, and that it is unitary. Using a single, simple proof template, and only these (or weaker) properties, we obtain some new proofs and many generalizations of these basic uncertainty principles, to new operators and to new settings, in a completely unified way. Together with our general overview, this paper can also serve as a survey of the many facets of the phenomena known as uncertainty principles.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)225-261
Number of pages37
JournalBulletin of the American Mathematical Society
Volume58
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. American Mathematical Society.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE: VARIATIONS ON A THEME'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this