This book provides a modern survey of some basic properties of Sturm-Liouville problems and to bring the reader to the forefront of knowledge of some areas of the theory. For example, some special Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problems are equivalent to certain Jacobi and cyclic Jacobi matrix eigenvalue problems. A new approach to problems with periodic conditions is developed.

Norm inequalities relating (i) a function and two of its derivatives and (ii) a sequence and two of its differences are studied. Detailed elementary proofs of basic inequalities are given. These are accessible to anyone with a background of advanced calculus and a rudimentary knowledge of the Lp and lp spaces. The classical inequalities associated with the names of Landau, Hadamard, Hardy and Littlewood, Kolmogorov, Schoenberg and Caravetta, etc., are discussed, as well as their discrete analogues and weighted versions. Best constants and the existence and nature of extremals are studied and many open questions raised. An extensive list of references is provided, including some of the vast Soviet literature on this subject.

In 1836-1837 Sturm and Liouville published a series of papers on second order linear ordinary differential operators, which started the subject now known as the Sturm-Liouville problem. In 1910 Hermann Weyl published an article which started the study of singular Sturm-Liouville problems. Since then, the Sturm-Liouville theory remains an intensely active field of research, with many applications in mathematics and mathematical physics. The purpose of the present book is (a) to provide a modern survey of some of the basic properties of Sturm-Liouville theory and (b) to bring the reader to the forefront of knowledge about some aspects of this theory. To use the book, only a basic knowledge of advanced calculus and a rudimentary knowledge of Lebesgue integration and operator theory are assumed. An extensive list of references and examples is provided and numerous open problems are given. The list of examples includes those classical equations and functions associated with the names of Bessel, Fourier, Heun, Ince, Jacobi, Jorgens, Latzko, Legendre, Littlewood-McLeod, Mathieu, Meissner, Morse, as well as examples associated with the harmonic oscillator and the hydrogen atom. Many special functions of applied mathematics and mathematical physics occur in these examples.

In 1910 Herman Weyl published one of the most widely quoted papers of the 20th century in Analysis, which initiated the study of singular Sturm-Liouville problems. The work on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s, including the proof of the spectral theorem for unbounded self-adjoint operators in Hilbert space by von Neumann and Stone, provided some of the motivation for the study of differential operators in Hilbert space with particular emphasis on self-adjoint operators and their spectrum. Since then the topic developed in several directions and many results and applications have been obtained. In this monograph the authors summarize some of these directions discussing self-adjoint, symmetric, and dissipative operators in Hilbert and Symplectic Geometry spaces. Part I of the book covers the theory of differential and quasi-differential expressions and equations, existence and uniqueness of solutions, continuous and differentiable dependence on initial data, adjoint expressions, the Lagrange Identity, minimal and maximal operators, etc. In Part II characterizations of the symmetric, self-adjoint, and dissipative boundary conditions are established. In particular, the authors prove the long standing Deficiency Index Conjecture. In Part III the symmetric and self-adjoint characterizations are extended to two-interval problems. These problems have solutions which have jump discontinuities in the interior of the underlying interval. These jumps may be infinite at singular interior points. Part IV is devoted to the construction of the regular Green's function. The construction presented differs from the usual one as found, for example, in the classical book by Coddington and Levinson.