Resolvent growth and Birkhoff-regularity

We prove a long standing conjecture in the theory of two-point boundary value problems that unconditional basisness implies Birkhoff-regularity. It is a corollary of our two main results: minimal resolvent growth along a sequence of points implies nonvanishing of a regularity determinant, and sparseness of nth-order roots of eigenvalues in small sectors provided that eigen and associated functions of the boundary value problem form an unconditional basis.Considerations are based on a new direct method, exploiting almost orthogonality of Birkhoff's solutions of the equation l(y)=λy. This property was discovered earlier by the author.