Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In 1946, Dennis Gabor claimed that any Lebesgue square-integrable function can be written as an infinite linear combination of time and frequency shifts of the standard Gaussian.  Since then, decomposition methods for larger classes of functions or distributions in terms of various elementary building blocks have lead to an impressive body of work in harmonic analysis. For example, Gabor analysis, which originated from Gabor's claim, is concerned with both the theory and the applications of the approximation properties of sets of time and frequency shifts of a given function. It re-emerged with the advent of wavelets at the end of the last century and is now at the intersection of many fields of mathematics, applied mathematics, engineering, and science. In this talk, I will introduce the fundamentals of the theory highlighting some applications and open problems.