A treatment of the Cauchy--Schwarz inequality in $C^*$-modules

We study the Cauchy--Schwarz and some related inequalities in a semi-inner product module over a $C^*$-algebra $\A$. The key idea is to consider a semi-inner product $\A$-module as a semi-inner product $\A$-module with respect to another semi-inner product. In this way, we improve some inequalities such as the Ostrowski inequality and an inequality related to the Gram matrix. The induced semi-inner products are also related to the the notion of covariance and variance. Furthermore, we obtain a sequence of nested inequalities that emerges from the Cauchy--Schwarz inequality. As a consequence, we derive some interesting operator-theoretical corollaries. In particular, we show that the sequence arising from our construction, when applied to a positive element of a $C^*$-algebra, converges to its pseudo-inverse.