Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 2 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2022 / Paper 1 / 3 / a

The homogeneous equation is a Cauchy-Euler equation. With the power-law ansatz $y=x^r$ on $x>0$, its indicial equation isThus $r=(1-\alpha )/2$ is a repeated indicial root. The two independent solutions are $x^r$ and $x^r\log x$, givingTheir Wronskian, with $W=y_1{y}_2^{\prime }-y_1^{\prime }{y}_2$, is $x^{2r-1}=x^{-\alpha }\ne 0$, verifying linear independence.