Is Zero Neither Even nor Odd?

Those who enjoyed the comments following this post here on the subject and then this one might also enjoy these comments, triggered by a Dec. 2, 2012 BBC article. My favorites:

no..it is not part of even numbers for sure they are 2, 4, 6, 8,…… [EV: For sure!]

it feels like an even number just as I feel that one is an odd number. I suppose it has to do with the maleness and femaleness of numbers.

“For mathematicians the answer is easy: zero is an even number.” Bollocks again, BBC, An even number is a number that is wholly divisible by two. A child knows this. You cannot wholly divide 0 by 2. Idiotic. Sensible people would point out that in the case of a zero you would step to the second number, in which case the two numbers are going to be divisible by ten and hence two. Perhaps this is where the dipshittery has sneaked in?

If zero is a number, then it must be a prime number too. I do not agree on thet.

If you take a number x and add/multiply/divide/substract 0, you will always end up with the same number [EV: !], but if you replace the zero with anything but zero you will always end up with a different number. So we can then cleary see that zero represents absence and not quantity. So isnt zero more the opposite of a number?

No zero is not even since it doesn’t gives any value when divided by it

Just to make things clear, zero is even, under the standard mathematical definition of evenness; if divided by two, it yields no remainder (0/2 = 0 with remainder 0), and that’s all it takes. And zero is a number, though it often refers to the absence of things, just as the word “nothing” is a word, though it often refers to the absence of things. (Likewise, negative integers are numbers, and can be even or odd, even though they don’t directly correspond to, say, the number of beans on your plate or the number of sheep in your flock.)

To be sure, zero is neither positive nor negative, and one is neither prime nor composite, two things that might confuse some people by analogy. But zero is even.

UPDATE: When I go to the individual page for this post, I see an ad with the headline, “Fix Defiant ODD Children” — I assume it’s this ODD, not the one in the title of this post.

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