3 ms·

Yes, it is. Please don't upvote fluff pieces like this.

• zem 14y ago
  did you read the article or just the title? > 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.
  • morsch 14y ago
    That's interesting, but hardly unexpected from a cognitive perspective. Zero is even, but it's not a prototypical even number (like 2). Similarly, if you ask people whether an ostrich a bird, they take longer to respond than with a more typical example. A very clearly (and simply?) defined category such as even numbers is an interesting edge case of the phenomenon.
    • zem 14y ago
      yeah, not unexpected, but definitely interesting. certainly not a "fluff piece" as the grandparent was claiming.