The Faith-Menal conjecture is one of the three main open conjectures on QF rings. It says that every right noetherian and left FP-injective ring is QF. In this paper, it is proved that the conjecture is true if every nonzero complement left ideal of the ring R is not small (or not singular). Several known results are then obtained as corollaries.

Let g be the Witt algebra or the positive Witt algebra. It is well known that the enveloping algebra U(g) has intermediate growth and thus infinite Gelfand–Kirillov (GK-) dimension. We prove that the GK-dimension of U(g) is just infinite in the sense that any proper quotient of U(g) has polynomial growth. This proves a conjecture of Petukhov and the second named author for the positive Witt algebra. We also establish the corresponding results for quotients of the symmetric algebra S(g) by proper Poisson ideals. In fact, we prove more generally that any central quotient of the universal enveloping algebra of the Virasoro algebra has just infinite GK-dimension. We give several applications. In particular, we easily compute the annihilators of Verma modules over the Virasoro algebra.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the index of reducibility and Chern coefficients for primary ideals. As an application, we give characterizations of a Cohen–Macaulay ring in terms of its type, irreducible multiplicity, and Chern coefficients with respect to certain parameter ideals in Noetherian local rings.