We give a short proof of the fundamental theorem of central element theory (see: Sanchez Terraf and Vaggione, Varieties with definable factor congruences, T.A.M.S. 361). The original proof is constructive and very involved and relies strongly on the fact that the class be a variety. Here we give a more direct nonconstructive proof which applies for the more general case of a first-order class which is both closed under the formation of direct products and direct factors.

Wu [‘An order characterization of commutativity for $C^{\ast }$ -algebras’, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.129 (2001), 983–987] proved that if the exponential function on the set of all positive elements of a $C^{\ast }$ -algebra is monotone in the usual partial order, then the algebra in question is necessarily commutative. In this note, we present a local version of that result and obtain a characterisation of central elements in $C^{\ast }$ -algebras in terms of the order.

Pseudo-effect algebras are partial algebras (E; +, 0, 1) with a partially defined addition + which is not necessary commutative and with two complements, left and right ones. We define central elements of a pseudo-effect algebra and the centre, which in the case of MV-algebras coincides with the set of Boolean elements and in the case of effect algebras with the Riesz decomposition property central elements are only characteristic elements. If E satisfies general comparability, then E is a pseudo MV-algebra. Finally, we apply central elements to obtain a variation of the Cantor-Bernstein theorem for pseudo-effect algebras.