Continuous and discrete uncertainty principles

Uncertainty principles go back to the early years of quantum mechanics. Originally introduced to describe the impossibility for a function to be sharply localized in both the direct and Fourier spaces, localization being measured by variance, it has been generalized to many other situations, including different representation spaces and different localization measures. In this talk we first review classical results on variance uncertainty inequalities (in particular Heisenberg, Robertson and Breitenberger inequalities). We then focus on discrete (and in particular finite-dimensional) situations, where variance has to be replaced with more suitable localization measures. We then present recent results on support and entropic inequalities, describing joint localization properties of vector expansions with respect to two frames. Keywords: uncertainty principle - variance of a function - Heisenberg inequality - support inequalities - entropic inequalities