Regular and singular Sturm-Liouville problems with coupled boundary conditions

Eigenvalues of both regular and singular Sturm-Liouville (S-L) problems with general coupled self-adjoint boundary conditions are characterised. This characterisation, although elementary, appears to be new even in the regular case. The singular characterisation is an exact parallel of the regular one and reduces to it. One application yields inequalities among the eigenvalues of different coupled boundary conditions. This is a far-reaching extension, even in the regular case, of the well-known relationship among the periodic and semiperiodic eigenvalues.