On some results in Sturm-Liouville theory and their generalizations to higher dimensions
Sturm's oscillation theorem says that the zeros of the nth eigenfunction of a Sturm-Liouville problem with separated boundary conditions divides the domain into n connected pieces. We present a proof of this theorem which partly uses a variational characterization of the eigenfunctions. We also show how the variational characterization can be adapted to study some properties of the eigenvalues
