Research Article
Hierarchies of Difference Boundary Value Problems
Author affiliations
School of Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, South Africa
Citation and License
Boundary Value Problems 2011, 2011:743135 doi:10.1155/2011/743135
Published: 18 January 2011Abstract
This paper generalises the work done in Currie and Love (2010), where we studied the
effect of applying two Crum-type transformations to a weighted second-order difference
equation with various combinations of Dirichlet, non-Dirichlet, and affine
-dependent boundary conditions at the end points, where
is the eigenparameter. We now consider general
-dependent boundary conditions. In particular we show, using one of the Crum-type
transformations, that it is possible to go up and down a hierarchy of boundary value
problems keeping the form of the second-order difference equation constant but possibly
increasing or decreasing the dependence on
of the boundary conditions at each step. In addition, we show that the transformed
boundary value problem either gains or loses an eigenvalue, or the number of eigenvalues
remains the same as we step up or down the hierarchy.


