We introduce the fundamental group ${\mathcal F}(A)$ of a simple $\sigma$-unital $C^*$-algebra $A$ with unique (up to scalar multiple) densely defined lower semicontinuous trace. This is a generalization of ``Fundamental Group of Simple $C^*$-algebras with Unique Trace I and II'' by Nawata and Watatani. Our definition in this paper makes sense for stably projectionless $C^*$-algebras. We show that there exist separable stably projectionless $C^*$-algebras such that their fundamental groups are equal to $\mathbb{R}_+^\times$ by using the classification theorem of Razak and Tsang. This is a contrast to the unital case in Nawata and Watatani. This study is motivated by the work of Kishimoto and Kumjian.

We inspect the relationship between relative Fourier multipliers on noncommutative Lebesgue-Orlicz spaces of a discrete group $\varGamma$ and relative Toeplitz-Schur multipliers on Schatten-von-Neumann-Orlicz classes. Four applications are given: lacunary sets, unconditional Schauder bases for the subspace of a Lebesgue space determined by a given spectrum $\varLambda\subseteq\varGamma$, the norm of the Hilbert transform and the Riesz projection on Schatten-von-Neumann classes with exponent a power of 2, and the norm of Toeplitz Schur multipliers on Schatten-von-Neumann classes with exponent less than 1.

We give bounds on the distance from a non-zero idempotent to the set of nilpotents in the set of $n\times n$ matrices in terms of the norm of the idempotent. We construct explicit idempotents and nilpotents which achieve these distances, and determine exact distances in some special cases.