Recent developments in Sturm-Liouville theory (Q827233)

The book under review is devoted to the theory of Sturm-Liouville problems and mostly consists of results obtained by the author and his coauthors. It can be considered as a continuation of the author's well-known monograph [\textit{A. Zettl}, Sturm-Liouville theory. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society (AMS) (2005; Zbl 1103.34001)]. The book contains ten chapters and two appendices. Each chapter concludes with a section devoted to bibliographical comments. The first two chapters discuss regular problems with separated and coupled boundary conditions, respectively. In the next three chapters the author considers some extensions of this theory and in particular boundary value problems with only a finite number of eigenvalues -- the so-called \emph{problems of Atkinson type}. They are obtained by writing the original Sturm-Liouville equation as a first-order system, dividing the main interval into subintervals, and then taking the coefficients of this system equal to zero alternately in these subintervals. Chapter 6 deals with eigenvalues below the essential spectrum of limit-point Sturm-Liouville problems and is based on the paper [\textit{M. Zhang}, \textit{J. Sun}, and \textit{A. Zettl}, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 419, No. 1, 627--642 (2014; Zbl 1305.34147)]. Chapter 7 discusses the approximation of eigenvalues of singular problems with eigenparameter dependent boundary conditions with those of regular problems and is based on [\textit{M. Zhang}, \textit{J. Sun}, and \textit{A. Zettl}, Result. Math. 63, No. 3--4, 1311--1330 (2013; Zbl 1273.34034)]. The second part of the book is devoted to problems with discontinuity conditions inside an interval. Such problems are called \emph{two-interval problems} in the book and are introduced in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 contains the construction of the Green's function and is based on the paper [\textit{A. Wang} and \textit{A. Zettl}, Electron. J. Differ. Equ. 2013, Paper No. 76, 13 p. (2013; Zbl 1290.34038)]. A detailed discussion of the Legendre equation is given in Chapter 10, which is based on [\textit{L. L. Littlejohn} and \textit{A. Zettl}, Electron. J. Differ. Equ. 2011, Paper No. 69, 33 p. (2011; Zbl 1417.34206)]. The book concludes with a list of notations and some open problems.