Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 May 2009
A well-known fact concerning a prime right Goldie ring R, proved in [4, Section 5], is that an essential right ideal is generated by the regular elements which it contains. There is a modification of that proof which shows that each element of R is the sum of at most two regular elements. This suggested that the recent results of Chatters and Ginn [1] concerning rings generated by their regular elements might possibly be refined a little, since their arguments actually show that elements of R are sums of at most three regular elements.