Matrices over a commutative ring as sums of three idempotents or three involutions

Abstract

Motivated by Hirano-Tominaga’s work on rings for which every element is a sum of two idempotents and by de Seguins Pazzis’s results on decomposing every matrix over a field of positive characteristic as a sum of idempotent matrices, we address decomposing every matrix over a commutative ring as a sum of three idempotent matrices and, respectively, as a sum of three involutive matrices.