Uncertainty principles for orthonormal bases

In this survey, we present various forms of the uncertainty principle (Hardy, Heisenberg, Benedicks). We further give a new interpretation of the uncertainty principles as a statement about the time-frequency localization of elements of an orthonormal basis, which improves previous unpublished results of H. Shapiro. Finally, we show that Benedicks’ result implies that solutions of the Shr"{o}dinger equation have some (appearently unnoticed) energy dissipation property.