In [W], Witten considered the indices of elliptic operators on the free loop space CM of a spin manifold M. In particular the index of the formal signature operator on the loop space is exactly the elliptic genus of Landweber-Stong-Ochanine [LS],[O]. Motivated by physics, Witten made the conjectures about the rigidity of these elliptic operators which say that their 51-equivariant indices on M are independent of g G Sl. See [L] for the early history of the subject.

We give two homological proofs of the Noetherianity of the category FI, a fundamental result discovered by Church, Ellenberg, Farb, and Nagpal.

We give bounds for various homological invariants (including Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity, degrees of local cohomology, and injective dimension) of finitely generated VI-modules in the non-describing characteristic case. It turns out that the formulas of these bounds for VI-modules are the same as the formulas of corresponding bounds for FI-modules.

Let $\Lambda$ be a finite dimensional algebra and $G$ be a finite group whose elements act on $\Lambda$ as algebra automorphisms. Under the assumption that $\Lambda$ has a complete set $E$ of primitive orthogonal idempotents, closed under the action of a Sylow $p$-subgroup $S \leqslant G$, we show that the skew group algebra $\Lambda G$ and $\Lambda$ have the same finitistic dimension and the same strong global dimension if the action of $S$ on $E$ is free. Using a homological characterization of piecewise hereditary algebras proved by Happel and Zacharia, we deduce that $\Lambda G$ is piecewise hereditary if and only if $S$ acts freely on $E$ and $\Lambda$ is piecewise hereditary as well.

We extend our family rigidity and vanishing theorems in [{\bf LiuMaZ}] to the Spin^ c case. In particular, we prove a K-theory version of the main results of [{\bf H}],[{\bf Liu1}, Theorem B] for a family of almost complex manifolds.