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

Let R be a ring. R is called a quasi-Frobenius (QF) ring if R is right artinian and RR is an injective right R-module. In this article, we introduce (weak) fuzzy homomorphisms of modules to obtain a fuzzy characterization of QF rings. We also obtain some fuzzy characterizations of right artinian rings and right CF rings. These results throw new light on the research of QF rings and the related CF conjecture.

In this paper, we obtain a class of irreducible Virasoro modules by taking tensor products of the irreducible Virasoro modules $\Omega(\lambda,b)$ with irreducible highest weight modules $V(\theta ,h)$ or with irreducible Virasoro modules $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta}(N)$ defined in Mazorchuk and Zhao (Selecta Math. (N.S.) 20:839–854,2014). We determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for two such irreducible tensor products to be isomorphic. Then we prove that the tensor product of $\Omega(\lambda,b)$ with a classical Whittaker module is isomorphic to the module $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta, \lambda}(\mathbb{C}_{\mathbf{m}})$ defined in Mazorchuk and Weisner (Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 142:3695–3703,2014). As a by-product we obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions for the module $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta, \lambda}(\mathbb{C}_{\mathbf{m}})$ to be irreducible. We also generalize the module $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta, \lambda}(\mathbb{C}_{\mathbf{m}})$ to $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta,\lambda}(\mathcal{B}^{(n)}_{\mathbf{s}})$ for any non-negative integer $n$ and use the above results to completely determine when the modules $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta,\lambda}(\mathcal{B}^{(n)}_{\mathbf{s}})$ are irreducible. The submodules of $\mathrm{Ind}_{\theta,\lambda}(\mathcal{B}^{(n)}_{\mathbf{s}})$ are studied and an open problem in Guo et al. (J. Algebra 387:68–86,2013) is solved. Feigin–Fuchs’ Theorem on singular vectors of Verma modules over the Virasoro algebra is crucial to our proofs in this paper.

In this paper, we prove that every invertible 2-local or local automorphism of a simple generalized Witt algebra over any field of characteristic 0 is an automorphism. Furthermore, every 2-local or local automorphism of Witt algebras W_n is an automorphism for all n∈N. But some simple generalized Witt algebras indeed have 2-local (and local) automorphisms that are not automorphisms.

Let k be a commutative Noetherian ring. In this paper we consider filtered modules of the category FI firstly introduced by Nagpal. We show that a finitely generated FI-module V is filtered if and only if its higher homologies all vanish, and if and only if a certain homology vanishes. Using this homological characterization, we characterize finitely generated FI-modules V whose projective dimension is finite, and describe an upper bound for it. Furthermore, we give a new proof for the fact that V induces a finite complex of filtered modules, and use it as well as a result of Church and Ellenberg to obtain another upper bound for homological degrees of V.