«According to Dr James Grime of the Millennium Maths Project at Cambridge University, reaction time experiments in the 1990s revealed people are 10% slower at deciding whether zero is odd or even than other numbers.
Children find it particularly difficult to recognise if zero is odd or even. "A survey of primary school children in the 1990s showed that about 50% thought zero is even, about 20% thought it was odd and the remaining 30% thought it was neither, both, or that they don't know," explains Dr Grime.
"It appears that we may file numbers mentally into lists such as the even numbers two, four, six, eight or numbers to the power of two which would include two, four, six, eight or two, four, eight, 16. Zero is not on these lists so it takes us longer to work out."
So why, mathematically, is zero an even number? Because any number that can be divided by two to create another whole number is even.
Zero passes this test because if you halve zero you get zero.
Zero also has odd numbers either side of it - minus one and one - and so this is another test it passes to be classified as an even number.»
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