Hans Georg Feichtinger

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Hans Georg Feichtinger
Hgfei class2011.jpg
Hans Georg Feichtinger teaching
Born (1951-06-16) 16 June 1951 (age 71)
Alma mater University of Vienna
Known for Gabor analysis
Modulation spaces
Feichtinger's algebra
Feichtinger conjecture
Coorbit theory
Wiener amalgam spaces
Scientific career
Fields Mathematician
Institutions University of Vienna
Doctoral advisor Hans Reiter
Doctoral students Peter Balazs

Hans Georg Feichtinger (born 16 June 1951) is an Austrian mathematician. He is Professor in the mathematical faculty of the University of Vienna. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications (JFAA) and associate editor to several other journals. He is one of the founders and head of the Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group (NuHAG) at University of Vienna. Today Feichtinger's main field of research is harmonic analysis with a focus on time-frequency analysis.

Contents

Biography

Hans Georg Feichtinger was born in Wiener Neustadt where he graduated from the Gymnasium and received the Matura "summa cum laude" in 1969. In the same year he started his studies in mathematics and physics. He finished his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1974 under the supervision of Hans Reiter in 1974 with a doctoral thesis on Subalgebras of L1(G). Feichtinger attained professorship with the defense of his habilitation thesis on Banach convolution algebras of functions [1] in 1979. Feichtinger is author or co-author to roughly 200 scientific publications.

The University of Vienna being the center of his scientific life, Feichtinger still had several visiting positions across Europe and in the USA between 1980 and today, e.g. at the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is married and the father of four children. [2]

The NuHAG (Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group)

In the late 1980s Hans Georg Feichtinger and Karlheinz Gröchenig conducted joint research on atomic decompositions. From 1990 on, Feichtinger investigated irregular sampling and computational harmonic analysis with Thomas Strohmer. These cooperations were the basis for founding the Numerical Harmonic Analysis Group (NuHAG) at the University of Vienna with Feichtinger as group leader. While the research project Experimental Signal Analysis is noted as the starting point of NuHAG [3] several earlier publications and projects are listed to be NuHAG related, the earliest dates back to 1986. [4] Over the years, NuHAG has become a group of international importance in the fields from abstract harmonic analysis to applied time-frequency analysis and currently hosts around 40 researchers (including PhD students). [5]

Dedication to the University of Vienna and the scientific community

Hans Georg Feichtinger is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications taking over from John J. Benedetto in the year 2000, and associate editor to the Journal of Approximation Theory (JAT), the Journal of Function spaces and Applications (JFSA) and Sampling Theory in Signal and Image Processing (STSIP). Furthermore, Feichtinger was for many years the contact person for the European Union's student exchange program LEONARDO at the faculty of mathematics of the University of Vienna and is actively involved in workshops and conferences. [6] Throughout his career Hans G. Feichtinger has supervised 23 completed PhD theses, also today he is advising several students (as of June 2011). [7]

Scientific work

The scientific work of Hans Georg Feichtinger includes, but is not limited to results on function spaces, irregular sampling, time-frequency analysis, Gabor analysis and frame theory. Some of his most notable contributions are listed below.

In the early 1980s, Feichtinger introduced modulation spaces, a family of function spaces defined by the behavior of the short-time Fourier transform with respect to a test function from the Schwartz space. They have become the standard spaces in time-frequency analysis. Also, while the concept of function spaces treating local and global behavior separately was already known earlier, Wiener amalgam spaces were introduced by Feichtinger in 1980, also his publications have contributed to the acknowledgment of amalgam spaces as a useful tool in various mathematical fields.

Around 1990 the joint research with Karlheinz Gröchenig lead to a series of papers, which is today referred to as coorbit theory. The theory provides a unified framework for different important transforms, e.g. the wavelet transform and the short-time Fourier transform.

Feichtinger also proposed the use of Banach Gelfand triples, especially the Banach Gelfand triple that has proven very useful, e.g. in time-frequency analysis.

Feichtinger's conjecture

Prof. Feichtinger and Prof. Kadison at a meeting in 2011 Prof. Feichtinger and Prof. Kadison, mathematicians, FeiKad.jpg
Prof. Feichtinger and Prof. Kadison at a meeting in 2011

Feichtinger once raised the question, whether

Every bounded frame can be written as a finite union of Riesz basic sequences.

The question is now widely referred to as Feichtinger's conjecture, a term first used by Peter G. Casazza.

This question was not only an important open problem in frame theory but was found to be equivalent to the famous and long-open Kadison–Singer problem in analysis (first stated in 1959).

Proofs were known for certain special cases since 2005, [8] [9] and in 2013 an equivalent to the full conjecture was proved by Adam Marcus, Daniel A Spielman and Nikhil Srivastava. [10]


Selected publications

Hans Georg Feichtinger has published approximately 200 scientific articles, [11] a selection of which is presented below (in chronological order):

Related Research Articles

Digital signal processing (DSP) is the use of digital processing, such as by computers or more specialized digital signal processors, to perform a wide variety of signal processing operations. The digital signals processed in this manner are a sequence of numbers that represent samples of a continuous variable in a domain such as time, space, or frequency. In digital electronics, a digital signal is represented as a pulse train, which is typically generated by the switching of a transistor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fourier analysis</span> Branch of mathematics

In mathematics, Fourier analysis is the study of the way general functions may be represented or approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. Fourier analysis grew from the study of Fourier series, and is named after Joseph Fourier, who showed that representing a function as a sum of trigonometric functions greatly simplifies the study of heat transfer.

Harmonic analysis is a branch of mathematics concerned with the representation of functions or signals as the superposition of basic waves, and the study of and generalization of the notions of Fourier series and Fourier transforms. In the past two centuries, it has become a vast subject with applications in areas as diverse as number theory, representation theory, signal processing, quantum mechanics, tidal analysis and neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wavelet</span> Function for integral Fourier-like transform

A wavelet is a wave-like oscillation with an amplitude that begins at zero, increases or decreases, and then returns to zero one or more times. Wavelets are termed a "brief oscillation". A taxonomy of wavelets has been established, based on the number and direction of its pulses. Wavelets are imbued with specific properties that make them useful for signal processing.

In mathematics, a basis function is an element of a particular basis for a function space. Every function in the function space can be represented as a linear combination of basis functions, just as every vector in a vector space can be represented as a linear combination of basis vectors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fourier transform</span> Mathematical transform that expresses a function of time as a function of frequency

A Fourier transform (FT) is a mathematical transform that decomposes functions into frequency components, which are represented by the output of the transform as a function of frequency. Most commonly functions of time or space are transformed, which will output a function depending on temporal frequency or spatial frequency respectively. That process is also called analysis. An example application would be decomposing the waveform of a musical chord into terms of the intensity of its constituent pitches. The term Fourier transform refers to both the frequency domain representation and the mathematical operation that associates the frequency domain representation to a function of space or time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frequency domain</span> Signal representation

In physics, electronics, control systems engineering, and statistics, the frequency domain refers to the analysis of mathematical functions or signals with respect to frequency, rather than time. Put simply, a time-domain graph shows how a signal changes over time, whereas a frequency-domain graph shows how much of the signal lies within each given frequency band over a range of frequencies. A frequency-domain representation can also include information on the phase shift that must be applied to each sinusoid in order to be able to recombine the frequency components to recover the original time signal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabor filter</span> Linear filter used for texture analysis

In image processing, a Gabor filter, named after Dennis Gabor, is a linear filter used for texture analysis, which essentially means that it analyzes whether there is any specific frequency content in the image in specific directions in a localized region around the point or region of analysis. Frequency and orientation representations of Gabor filters are claimed by many contemporary vision scientists to be similar to those of the human visual system. They have been found to be particularly appropriate for texture representation and discrimination. In the spatial domain, a 2D Gabor filter is a Gaussian kernel function modulated by a sinusoidal plane wave.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wavelet transform</span> Mathematical technique used in data compression and analysis

In mathematics, a wavelet series is a representation of a square-integrable function by a certain orthonormal series generated by a wavelet. This article provides a formal, mathematical definition of an orthonormal wavelet and of the integral wavelet transform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabor transform</span>

The Gabor transform, named after Dennis Gabor, is a special case of the short-time Fourier transform. It is used to determine the sinusoidal frequency and phase content of local sections of a signal as it changes over time. The function to be transformed is first multiplied by a Gaussian function, which can be regarded as a window function, and the resulting function is then transformed with a Fourier transform to derive the time-frequency analysis. The window function means that the signal near the time being analyzed will have higher weight. The Gabor transform of a signal x(t) is defined by this formula:

In applied mathematics, Gabor atoms, or Gabor functions, are functions used in the analysis proposed by Dennis Gabor in 1946 in which a family of functions is built from translations and modulations of a generating function.

Overcompleteness is a concept from linear algebra that is widely used in mathematics, computer science, engineering, and statistics. It was introduced by R. J. Duffin and A. C. Schaeffer in 1952.

Ahmed I. Zayed is an Egyptian American mathematician. His research interests include Sampling Theory, Wavelets, Medical Imaging, Fractional Fourier transform,Sinc Approximations, Boundary Value Problems, Special Functions and Orthogonal polynomials, Integral transforms.

Modulation spaces are a family of Banach spaces defined by the behavior of the short-time Fourier transform with respect to a test function from the Schwartz space. They were originally proposed by Hans Georg Feichtinger and are recognized to be the right kind of function spaces for time-frequency analysis. Feichtinger's algebra, while originally introduced as a new Segal algebra, is identical to a certain modulation space and has become a widely used space of test functions for time-frequency analysis.

In mathematics, amalgam spaces categorize functions with regard to their local and global behavior. While the concept of function spaces treating local and global behavior separately was already known earlier, Wiener amalgams, as the term is used today, were introduced by Hans Georg Feichtinger in 1980. The concept is named after Norbert Wiener.

In mathematics, coorbit theory was developed by Hans Georg Feichtinger and Karlheinz Gröchenig around 1990. It provides theory for atomic decomposition of a range of Banach spaces of distributions. Among others the well established wavelet transform and the short-time Fourier transform are covered by the theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Balazs (mathematician)</span> Austrian mathematician

Peter Balazs is an Austrian mathematician working at the Acoustics Research Institute Vienna of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

References

  1. , Universitätsbibliothek Wien
  2. , Hans Georg Feichtinger's Homepage
  3. , The 'Experimental Signal Analysis' project at NuHAG
  4. , NuHAG research page
  5. , NuHAG member page
  6. , NuHAG event database
  7. Hans Georg Feichtinger at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  8. Frames and the Feichtinger Conjecture by Peter G. Casazza, Ole Christensen, Alexander M. Lindner and Roman Vershynin
  9. The Feichtinger Conjecture for Wavelet Frames, Gabor Frames and Frames of Translates by Marcin Bownik and Darrin Speegle
  10. Interlacing Families II: Mixed Characteristic Polynomials and the Kadison-Singer Problem by Adam Marcus, Daniel A Spielman and Nikhil Srivastava
  11. , NuHAG BIBTEX database