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 S_0 \subset L^2 \subset S_0' that has proven very useful, e.g. in time-frequency analysis.
Feichtinger's conjecture 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, and in 2013 an equivalent to the full conjecture was proved by
Adam Marcus,
Daniel A Spielman and
Nikhil Srivastava. \pi of a
locally compact group \mathcal G on a Hilbert space \mathcal H, with which one can define a transform of a function f \in \mathcal H with respect to g\in \mathcal H by V_g f (x) = \langle f, \pi(x)g \rangle. It is important to note that many important transforms are special cases of the transform, e.g. the short-time Fourier transform and the wavelet transform for the Heisenberg group and the affine group respectively. Representation theory yields the reproducing formula V_g f = V_g f * V_g g. By discretization of this continuous convolution integral it can be shown that by sufficiently dense sampling in phase space the corresponding functions will span a frame for the Hilbert space. An important aspect of the theory is the derivation of atomic decompositions for Banach spaces. One of the key steps is to define the voice transform for distributions in a natural way. For a given Banach space Y, the corresponding coorbit space is defined as the set of all distributions such that V_g f \in Y. The reproducing formula is true also in this case and therefore it is possible to obtain atomic decompositions for coorbit spaces.--> ==Selected publications==