In this paper, we illustrate the wave character of the metrics and curvatures of manifolds and introduce a new understanding toolthe hyperbolic geometric flow. This kind of flow is new and very natural to understand certain wave phenomena in the nature as well as the geometry of manifolds. It possesses many interesting properties from both mathematics and physics. Several applications of this method have been found.

Motivated by the Mario-Vafa formula of Hodge integrals and physicists' predictions on local Gromov-Witten invariants of toric Fano surfaces in a Calabi-Yau threefold, the third author conjectured a formula of certain Hodge integrals in terms of certain Chern-Simons invariants of the Hopf link. We prove this formula by virtual localization on moduli spaces of relative stable morphisms.

Based on large N Chern-Simons/topological string duality, in a series of papers, Labastida, Mario, Ooguri, and Vafa conjectured certain remarkable new algebraic structure of link invariants and the existence of infinite series of new integer invariants. In this paper, we provide a proof of this conjecture. Moreover, we also show these new integer invariants vanish at large genera.

THE MAIN PURPOSE of this paper is to give a simple and unified new proof of the Witten rigidity theorems, which were conjectured by Witten and first proved by Taubes [25], Bott-Taubes [S], Hirzebruch Cl23 and Krichever [15]. Our proof shows that the modular invariance, which is the intrinsic symmetry of elliptic genera, actually implies their rigidity. Some new properties of elliptic genera and their relationships with theta-functions are also discussed. We remark that our proof makes essential uses of the new feature of loop groups and loop spaces, the modular invariance. We note that, with the help of the modular group, we can catch the topological information on loop space by simply working on finite-dimensional manifold. By developing this idea further, in [21] we have proved the rigidity of the Dirac operator on loop space twisted by higher-level loop group representations, while the Witten ridigity theorems are the special cases of level 1. Many topological vanishing theorems are also derived in [21] by refining the argument in this paper, especially an &-vanishing theorem for loop space. In [19] modular invariance is used again to establish a general miraculous cancellation formula, relating the Hirzebruch L-form to certain twisted &-forms, which has many interesting topological results as consequences. These results were announced in [20].

In this paper, we continue our study of the canonical metrics on the moduli space of curves. We first prove the bounded geometry of the Ricci and perturbed Ricci metrics. By carefully choosing the pertubation constant and by studying the asymptotics, we show that the Ricci and holomorphic sectional curvatures of the perturbed Ricci metric are bounded from above and below by negative constants. Based on our understanding of the KhlerEinstein metric, we show that the logarithmic cotangent bundle over the DeligneMumford moduli space is stable with respect to the canonical polarization. Finally, in the last section, we prove the strongly bounded geometry of the KhlerEinstein metric by using the KhlerRicci flow and a priori estimates of the complex Monge-Ampere equation.