We discuss conjectures following from the attractor mechanism in type II string theory about the possible Chern classes of stable holomorphic vector bundles on Calabi-Yau threefolds. In particular, we give sufficient conditions for Chern classes to correspond to stable bundles.

Tautological systems developed in [8, 9] are Picard-Fuchs type systems to study period integrals of complete intersections in Fano varieties. We generalize tautological systems to zero loci of global sections of vector bundles. In particular, we obtain similar criterion as in [8, 9] about holonomicity and regularity of the systems. We also prove solution rank formulas and geometric realizations of solutions following the work on hypersurfaces in homogeneous varieties [4].

Due to the orbifold singularities, the intersection numbers on the moduli space of curves Mg, n are in general rational numbers rather than integers. We study the properties of the denominators of these intersection numbers and their relationship with the orders of automorphism groups of stable curves. We also present a conjecture about a multinomial type numerical property for a general class of Hodge integrals.

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Using the celebrated Witten-Kontsevich theorem, we prove a recursive formula of the n -point functions for intersection numbers on moduli spaces of curves. It has been used to prove the Faber intersection number conjecture and motivated us to find some conjectural vanishing identities for Gromov-Witten invariants. The latter has been proved recently by X. Liu and R. Pandharipande. We also give a combinatorial interpretation of n -point functions in terms of summation over binary trees.