“…There is a widely used linearization technique in the theory of Sturm-Liouville problems with boundary and/or discontinuity conditions polynomially dependent on the eigenvalue parameter. One considers a Hilbert (or Pontryagin) space of the form L 2 ⊕ C k and constructs a self-adjoint operator in this space such that the eigenvalue problem for this operator and the original boundary value problem become equivalent, in the sense that their eigenvalues coincide, the eigenfunctions of the latter problem are in one-to-one correspondence with the first components of the eigenvectors of the former problem, and so on (see, e.g., [1], [2], [8], and the references therein). Fulton [6, Remark 2.1] attributes this technique to Friedman [5, pp.…”