Mean oscillation of functions and the Paley-Wiener space

The oscillatory behavior of functions with compactly supported Fourier transform is characterized in a quantified way using various function spaces. In particular, the results in this article show that the oscillations of a function at large scale are comparable to the oscillations of its samples on an appropriate discrete set of points. Several open questions about spaces of sequences are answered and applications in the study of commutator operators on the Paley-Wiener space are shown. Acknowledgements and Notes. Supported in part by NSF grants DMS 9303363 and DMS 9623251.