Invertibility of the Difference of Idempotents

We study conditions equivalent to the invertibility of f -g when f and g are idempotents in a unital ring, and give applications to bounded linear operators in Banach and Hilbert spaces. In the setting of rings we are able to show that many conditions previously linked to finite dimensionality, rank equalities, norm topology of bounded linear operators or to properties of C *-algebras can be in fact proved by simple algebraic arguments.