Wikipedia:Peer review/Evenness of zero/archive1

Evenness of zero edit

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I'm driving this one towards FAC. It's already listed as GA, and I recently polished it. I want this entire process to be low-stress for all involved, so any kind of feedback is welcome. I'm particularly curious about these questions:

Does anyone have a strong opinion on the article title? I could speak at length on this choice, but I wonder what others' first thoughts are.
Could a volunteer who isn't shy about your real-world identity please contact Ball, Hill, and Bass and ask them to release the statistics on teachers for this question? (see "Teachers' knowledge" subsection)

Notices will be posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Education. Thanks, Melchoir (talk) 03:25, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

a work of historical fiction suggests that al-Khwārizmī became the first to call 0 even during his arguments to the Caliph that sifr was a number. What is this doing in the history section? it's speculation.
- True. However, it's not much worse than the other available reference. Would you suggest moving them both into the footnotes? Melchoir (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - Probably; that would be better than a section on evenness of zero in popular culture ;-> Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:30, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"Zero is even" should be at least a century older that 1849; but the way to check this is not to go back through primary sources, but to find a secondary source (not a popularization); that will be someone who has so thoroughly read the sources that his opinion that such and such a book is the oldest is valuable. Checking primary sources can prove that a date is too late, but not that it is too early.
- 1849 is merely a conservative upper bound, used in the absence of better evidence. Possibly the prose could make this clearer. I absolutely agree on the ideal kind of reference for this question. Unfortunately, when I searched for a reference a couple years ago while researching this article, I came up empty-handed. Would you, or another editor, like to volunteer to look for a reference yourself? I'll gladly delay the FAC until you report back with your findings. There's no timeline here. Melchoir (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This page, from 1842, does, however, distinguish between zero roots, and an even number of roots.
- Modern sources also often use such language, so I wouldn't say that it reflects the mathematical thinking of the time. Melchoir (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Is this a special case of the question "is zero a number?"
- Sure. Why do you ask? Melchoir (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - Then it may be more readable to recast as two articles: Zero as a number and Evenness of zero; the Greeks should be explained at length in the first, but get even less space in the second than they do now; they could not have asked "is zero even?". (And in general, the reply "zero isn't a number, and therefore isn't even" belongs in the first article.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 20:26, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - Hmm. I'm not sure what the relationship would be between Zero as a number and 0 (number)...
      I do think that this article should stay reasonably confined to parity, but of course some background information on "Is zero a number?" seeps in. I've tried to make sure it's as tightly scoped as possible already. For the Greeks it can get hard to separate because -- I think it was Aristotle who defined arithmetic as the science of even and odd? So they may well have viewed the questions "How far down do the numbers go?" and "How far down does parity go?" as the same question.
      Anyway, there's certainly a lot of general information on 0 that's left out; if you want to see for yourself, check out Levenson et al. Melchoir (talk) 22:04, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Replies inline. Melchoir (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:03, 24 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Anything else or anyone else...? Melchoir (talk) 23:53, 6 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]