Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 February 2012
Given differential expressions τ1; τ2, …, τn— not necessarily symmetric—which are regular on [0,∞), we investigate the relationship between the number of linearly independent L2(0,∞) solutions of the equations τjy = 0 and of the product equation (τ1τ2 … τn)y = 0. Our results extend those recently obtained in [15, 16, 17] for the special case τJ = τ for j = 1, …, n and τ is symmetric. In particular they include the classification results of Everitt and Giertz [4,5,6] for this special case when τ is a real second-order symmetric expression.