Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A well-known elementary linear algebra fact says that any linear independent set of vectors in a finite-dimensional vector space cannot have more elements than any spanning set. One way to obtain an analog of this result in the infinite dimensional setting is by replacing the comparison of cardinalities with a more suitable concept - which is the concept of densities. Basically one needs to compare the cardinalities locally everywhere and then take the appropriate limits. We provide a rigorous way to do this and obtain a universal density theorem that generalizes many classical density results. I will also discuss the connection between this result and the uncertainty principle in harmonic analysis.