Copyright © 2012 Panos K. Palamides and Alex P. Palamides. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We investigate the existence of positive or a negative solution of several classes of four-point boundary-value problems for fourth-order ordinary differential equations. Although these problems do not always admit a (positive) Green's function, the obtained solution is still of definite sign. Furthermore, we prove the existence of an entire continuum of solutions. Our technique relies on the continuum property (connectedness and compactness) of the solutions funnel (Kneser's Theorem), combined with the corresponding vector field.