Talk:Sturm-Liouville theory

Numbered equations

Hi Daniel,

I had to transform the templates provided in the WP article for numbered equations into plain old wikimarkup. I attempted to bring these templates over from WP, but they called many other templates and when I got them all over, the combined result didn't work. I decided to use a simple bit of html that defined a span with right justification and also defined an anchor. To reference the equation you then only need to insert a mediawiki markup referencing the anchor. It wouldn't be hard to turn this all into two templates if you think that would be useful. Dan Nessett 19:28, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Redacted comment. I see it now.

Error

It seems to me that the article contains an error. Consider the definition:

$Lu={1 \over w(x)}\left(-{d \over dx}\left[p(x){du \over dx}\right]+q(x)u\right)$

Contrary to what is implied in the article, the operator L thus defined is not self-adjoint, unless 1/w(x) commutes with the operator to its right. This is in general not the case. The proper way to transform is (L in the next equation is w(x) times L in the previous equation):

$Lu=\lambda \,w\;u\;\Longrightarrow \;w^{-1/2}Lw^{-1/2}w^{1/2}u=\lambda \,w^{1/2}u\;\Longrightarrow \;{\tilde {L}}\,{\tilde {u}}=\lambda \,{\tilde {u}}$

with

${\tilde {L}}\equiv w^{-1/2}Lw^{-1/2}\quad {\hbox{and}}\quad {\tilde {u}}\equiv w^{1/2}u$

Since w(x) is positive-definite w(x)^−½ is well-defined and real. The operator ${\tilde {L}}$ is self-adjoint.

--Paul Wormer 08:09, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

I am getting out of my field of expertise here, but let me ask some questions. First, the section defines L and then posits, " L gives rise to a self-adjoint operator." I am not sure what this means, but one way of interpreting it is L itself is not self-adjoint, but some transformation of it is. That is, L may not itself have real eigenvalues. This statement is followed by, "This can be seen formally by using integration by parts twice, where the boundary terms vanish by virtue of the boundary conditions. It then follows that the eigenvalues of a Sturm–Liouville operator are real and that eigenfunctions of L corresponding to different eigenvalues are orthogonal." This is, admittedly, vague. However, later in the section is the statement, "As a consequence of the Arzelà–Ascoli theorem this integral operator is compact and existence of a sequence of eigenvalues α_n which converge to 0 and eigenfunctions which form an orthonormal basis follows from the spectral theorem for compact operators." So, on the surface, it seems the integral operator plays some role in the argument.

That said, let me note that from the perspective of someone who has very little understanding of S-L theory, this section is obscure and would benefit from a complete rewrite. Dan Nessett 17:09, 14 October 2009 (UTC)