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The solutions on the right of Figure 4
are merging (far offscreen) as
,
and they are ``straight'' enough to try using the
theory of fences and funnels.
In fact, as a result of Condition II, we see from equation (12) that as
, solutions are going to behave very much like solutions to
the equation
. To be precise, from (12) we get

for all t > 0. Therefore, for any C, the curves

are respectively a lower fence and an upper fence for the differential
equation (12). That is, for every t>0 the slope
the slope of the direction field for
at that point, and
the slope of the direction field. Together these fences
define an antifunnel
, which is narrowing as
; see Figure 5.
We will show in Appendix C that there is exactly one solution
which is trapped in the narrowing antifunnel
for all
t>0, and that every solution of (12) for t > 0 is of this form for
some C.

Figure 5: Fences
and
forming the antifunnel
for equation
.
These facts allow us to determine the spacing of the zeroes of
.
Recall that
,
so
if and only if
is an odd multiple of
.
Figure 6 shows the
t-intervals in which the zeros of
must lie;
that is, the intervals between the curves
and
corresponding to equally spaced values of
.

Figure 6: The t-intervals trapping the zeroes of
; here
.
Let
denote the zero of
correponding to
. Since the solution
stays inside the
antifunnel
, it is clear that the interval defining
shrinks
as
; in fact, for large n we have

Hence (l'Hôpital) the distance
between successive zeros
approaches
0 as
. So our intuition that the oscillations are more and
more compressed, and that the distance between successive zeros goes to
zero as
, was correct!

Contents
Next: Analyzing r'/r.
Up: The balancing transformation.
Previous: The balancing transformation.