Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We improve on some recent results of Sagiv and Steinerberger that quantify the following uncertainty principle: for a function f with mean zero, then either the size of the zero set of the function or the cost of transporting the mass of the positive part of f to its negative part must be big. We also provide a sharp upper estimate of the transport cost of the positive part of an eigenfunction of the Laplacian.

This proves a conjecture of Steinerberger and provides a lower bound of the size of a nodal set of the eigenfunction. Finally, we use a similar technique to provide a measure of how well the points in a design in a manifold are equidistributed. This is a joint work with Tom Carroll and Xavier Massaneda.