New Sign Uncertainty Principles

We prove new sign uncertainty principles which vastly generalize the recent developments of Bourgain, Clozel & Kahane and Cohn & Gon\c{c}alves, and apply our results to a variety of spaces and operators. In particular, we establish new sign uncertainty principles for Fourier and Dini series, the Hilbert transform, the discrete Fourier and Hankel transforms, spherical harmonics, and Jacobi polynomials, among others. We present numerical evidence highlighting the relationship between the discrete and continuous sign uncertainty principles for the Fourier and Hankel transforms, which in turn are connected with the sphere packing problem via linear programming. Finally, we explore some connections between the sign uncertainty principle on the sphere and spherical designs.