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There are well-known inequalities among the eigenvalues of Sturm-Liouville problems with periodic, semi-periodic, Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. In this paper, for an arbitrary coupled self-adjoint boundary condition, we identify two separated boundary conditions corresponding to the Dirichlet and Neumann conditions in the classical case, and establish analogous inequalities. It is also well-known that the lowest periodic eigenvalue is simple; here we prove a similar result for the general case. Moreover, we show that the algebraic and geometric multiplicities of the eigenvalues of self-adjoint regular Sturm-Liouville problems with coupled boundary conditions are the same. An important step in our approach is to obtain a representation of the fundamental solutions for sufficiently negative values of the spectral parameter. Our approach yields the existence and boundedness from below of the eigenvalues of arbitrary self-adjoint regular Sturm-Liouville problems without using operator theory.

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1. IntroductionIn a recent paper [3], an extended Liouville–Green formulaformula herewas developed for solutions of the second-order differential equationformula hereHere γM(x) ∼Q−¼(x), QM(x) ∼Q−½(x) and εM(x)→0 as x→∞, while M([ges ]2) is an integer and γM and QM can be defined in terms of Q and its derivatives up to order M−1. The general form of (1·1) had been obtained previously by Cassell [5], [6], [7] and Eastham [10], [11, section 2·4]. In particular, the proof of (1·1) in [10] and [11] depended on the formulation of (1·2) as a first-order system and then on a process of M repeated diagonalization of the coefficient matrices in a sequence of related differential systems.