Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Dynamical sampling is the problem of recovering an unknown function from a set of space-time samples. This problem has many connections to problems in frame theory, operator theory and functional analysis. In this talk, we will state the problem and discuss its relations to various areas of functional analysis and operator theory, and we will give a brief review of previous results and present several new ones.

The Gabor system of a function is the set of all of its integer translations and modulations. The Balian-Low Theorem states that the Gabor system of a function which is well localized in both time and frequency cannot form an Riesz basis for $L^2(\mathbb{R})$. An important tool in the proof is a characterization of the Riesz basis property in terms of the boundedness of the Zak transform of the function. In this talk, we will discuss results showing that weaker basis-type properties also correspond to boundedness of the Zak transform, but in the sense of Fourier multipliers. We will also discuss using these results to prove generalizations of the Balian-Low theorem for Gabor systems with weaker basis properties, as well as for shift-invariant spaces with multiple generators and in higher dimensions.

Magyar, Stein, and Wainger proved a discrete variant in Zd of the continuous spherical maximal theorem in Rd for all d ≥ 5. Their argument proceeded via the celebrated “circle method” of Hardy, Littlewood, and Ramanujan and relied on estimates for continuous spherical maximal averages via a general transference principle. In this talk, we introduce a range of sparse bounds for discrete spherical maximal averages and discuss some ideas needed to obtain satisfactory control on the major and minor arcs. No sparse bounds were previously known in this setting.

The classical Balian-Low theorem states that if both a function and it's Fourier transform decay too fast then the Gabor system generated by this function (i.e. the system obtained from this function by taking integer translations and integer modulations) cannot be an orthonormal basis or a Riesz basis.Though it provides for an excellent `thumbs--rule' in time-frequency analysis, the Balian--Low theorem is not adaptable to many applications. This is due to the fact that in realistic situations information about a signal is given by a finite dimensional vector rather then by a function over the real line. In this work we obtain an analog of the Balian--Low theorem in the finite dimensional setting, as well as analogs to some of its extensions. Moreover, we will note that the classical Balian--Low theorem can be derived from these finite dimensional analogs.