Is zero an odd or even number?

Prolly could have looked this up, but thought i'd get your opinions first.

Well, is zero even or odd?.....Why?........And what would your definition of even / odd be?

I always thought that an even number was any number that could be divided by 2 and leave a whole number.

0/2 = 0 (which is an integer) so I'm of the opinion that it is indeed even. Am i wrong?

dudara

Any even number can be written in form of 2N, where N is some integer. Therefore if you take 0 to be an integer, then 0 is even under this definition.

If you don't take 0 as an integer, ie an integer must be a natural number {1,2,3...} then 0 is not even.

There are exceptions to this. Goldbach's conjecture is that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. But that conjecture also excludes 2 from the selected set of "even integers" being considered.

Bard

As said here:

A cleaner definition of "even" is this: X is even if there exists another integer N such that 2 times N is equal to X. In algebraic terms this avoids the division operation that can get complicated when run negative numbers through our rings and modoules. Division works, but I find the multiplicative definition to be much more elegant.

... which is more or less the same as dudara's answer.

According to a Wikipedia which quotes several sources and has almost 50 footnotes, Zero is an Even Number.

Fremen

Zero is an even number, but it is quite odd.

Thanks folks, I'll be here all week.