There has to be a link to the harmonic oscillator here. That's the Hamiltonian that's symmetric under exchange of position and momentum, and the Hermite functions are its eigenfunctions.
Indeed, the (quantum) harmonic oscillator Hamiltonian (with suitable scalings) commutes with the Fourier transform. Since the former has the Hermite functions as eigenbasis, the Hermite functions also form an eigenbasis for the latter.
