03/25/2026
By Joris Roos

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics invites you to attend a colloquium lecture by Oscar Blasco from the University of Valencia, Spain on Wednesday, April 8.

Title: Annihilating pairs of sets for the uncertainty principle
Time: 11 a.m. to Noon
Room: Southwick Hall, Room 350W

Everyone is welcome!

Abstract: The heuristic uncertainty principle establishes that it is not possible for both a function and its Fourier transform to be localized on "small" sets.
Let E and F be a pair of measurable sets on Euclidean space. The pair (E,F) is said to be annihilating if a function f in L^2 vanishes as soon as f is supported in E and its Fourier transform f^ is supported in F. The aim of the talk is to give some historical survey of several results on different conditions to obtain annihilating pairs and also its connection with the study of the compactness of the operator P_EQ_F acting on L^2 where P_E f stands for the restriction of f to the set E and Q_F f corresponds to the functions whose Fourier transform is the f^ restricted to F.

See all Mathematics and Statistics colloquia.