It is shown that if all powers of a ring element a are regular, then a is strongly pi-regular exactly when a suitable word in the powers of a and their inner inverses is a unit.

We study properties of the Drazin index of regular elements in a ring with a unity 1. We give expressions for generalized inverses of 1−ba in terms of generalized inverses of 1−ab. In our development we prove that the Drazin index of 1−ba is equal to the Drazin index of 1−ab.

For two given projections p and q in a C*-algebra, we investigate how to express the Drazin inverses of the product pq and the difference p−q, and give applications. As a special case, we obtain the results of [C. Y. Deng, ‘The Drazin inverses of products and differences of orthogonal projections’, J. Math. Anal. Appl.335 (2007) 64–71], with considerably simpler proofs.

This paper is concerned with the study of a class of closed linear operators densely defined on a Hilbert space $H$ and called B-Fredholm operators. We characterize a B-Fredholm operator as the direct sum of a Fredholm closed operator and a bounded nilpotent operator. The notion of an index of a B-Fredholm operator is introduced and a characterization of B-Fredholm operators with index $0$ is given in terms of the sum of a Drazin closed operator and a finite-rank operator. We analyse the properties of the powers $T^m$ of a closed B-Fredholm operator and we establish a spectral mapping theorem.

The purpose of this paper is to derive an integral representation of the Drazin inverse of an element of a Banach algebra in a more general situation than previously obtained by the second author, and to give an application to the Moore–Penrose inverse in a $C^*$-algebra.

AMS 2000 Mathematics subject classification:Primary 46H05; 46L05

In this paper we define and study a generalized Drazin inverse xD for ring elements x, and give a characterization of elements a, b for which aaD = bbD. We apply our results to the study of EP elements in a ring with involution.