Rings with Central Idempotent or Nilpotent Elements

Abstract

It is easy to see (cf. Theorem 1 below) that the centrality of all the nilpotent elements of a given associative ring implies the centrality of every idempotent element; and (Theorem 7) these two properties are in fact equivalent in any regular ring. We establish in this note various conditions, some necessary and some sufficient, for the centrality of nilpotent or idempotent elements in the wider class of π-regular rings (in Theorems 1, 2, 3 and 4 the rings in question are not even required to be π-regular).