What's so odd about odd numbers?

Hordes of anxious high school students are anxiously awaiting or have already gotten confirmation of acceptance from one or more of the colleges to which they have applied earlier in the fall. It is the annual culmination of a long and arduous process, one component of which are the personal statement and supplemental essays. Each university has a standard set of writing prompts ostensibly aimed at assessing the applicants’ writing and communication skills. Most of the essential information about the student's academic aptitude and personality has already been culled from transcripts, test scores and teacher recommendations.

College is not strictly necessary for everyone, except for those who seek to pursue a career in a field requiring a specialized set of skills such as medicine, engineering, accounting or law for instance. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Bill Gates needed a college education to do what they have done. Edgar Allen Poe dropped out of the University of Virginia, yet he is one of the most acclaimed writers of 19th century America. Knowledge is easily available through so many mediums today and an inquisitive mind has more than one way to quench that thirst. 

 There is a very sophisticated methodology at work behind the type of essay questions students are required to answer. Some attributes such as intelligence, athletic ability, musical talent, or leadership ability are innate and others have been honed with training and practice. Students claim to know what they want from a college but rarely do they know themselves well.  The next four years of the students’ collegiate lives will be a journey in maturity, discovery and self-examination which can challenge many of their preconceived assumptions. Beyond these qualities, the way these students learn to look at life and what they think about themselves and their role in the world will shape their perception of the world and influence their interaction with it in the future. What admissions officers really want to know is “what kind of person are you and how can you make the world, whether a university campus or the larger society more meaningful?”  In a way, the prompts are a variant of John F. Kennedy’s adjuration to “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

The University of Chicago is legendary for its rather eccentric prompts that, at first glance, don’t seem to follow any logical guidelines.One of my students told me about this question, "What's so odd about odd numbers?" which was first introduced in 2009, so I decided to take a stab at answering it from the vantage point of my years of experience in the outside world.

One of the earliest mathematical concepts taught in school after counting and adding is the concept of odd numbers. They are the foundation for other topics like division, and prime numbers. So what is it that makes odd numbers odd? Perhaps it is that they cannot be easily pigeonholed into one category. The mathematical definition of an odd number is a number that is not evenly divisible by 2. An odd number is an integer as well as a natural number but it is also a prime number. An odd number is missing a counterpart that allows it to be evenly divided.  If an odd number is divided by 2, it results in a fraction, a type of number that is less than whole.  This specific property means that even numbers are easier to manipulate mathematically because we are used to balance and symmetry. As a society, we value wholeness over fragmentation.This concept of balance is central to an understanding of “oddness.”  Two odd numbers added together always equal an even number, which is balanced because it has equal parts of the same number in it. On the outside, the human body is symmetrically divided into two parts with two eyes, two ears, two hands, two arms, two legs, one on each side. Riding a bicycle requires a good sense of balance. Riding a unicycle requires good balance but takes more effort to achieve, because the rider's weight is unevenly distributed on one wheel. We are used to seeing bicycles in our daily lives but unicycles only as a form of entertainment at the circus, probably because they look odd.

The common definition of odd is “different from what is usual or expected; strange.”  To be odd is to have something essential missing. We seem to have a morbid fear of oddness because it is considered a negative quality and is interpreted to mean that there is something lacking that makes a person or thing unacceptable or unwelcome.  Informal British English includes terms such as “an odd sort” or “odd duck” or “odd man out” to refer to a person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group or set in some way.

In a June 11, 2015 article in the online magazine “Frontiers in Psychology”, researchers James Wilkie and Galen Bodenhausen postulated that objects, actions and concepts can even have gender associations and further found that such associations profoundly influenced people’s perceptions and decision-making processes. In a 2012 experiment they conducted, “participants rated the concept of “even numbers” as relatively feminine and the concept of “odd numbers” as relatively masculine. Further, they found that when odd numbers were arbitrarily paired with gender-ambiguous stimuli (baby faces or foreign names), the stimuli were rated as more likely to be male, yet when even numbers accompanied the same stimuli, they were more likely to be seen as female.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462645/ 

A 1994 study by Eagly and Mladinic referenced in the same article found that qualities that were generally perceived as feminine were associated with greater likability. Therefore, since odd numbers were considered “masculine” they tended to be looked on less favorably than even numbers.

Because “odd” stands out, it seems to require something else that earns societal acceptance or approval. The late singer David Bowie was known for being a highly gifted individual. In his early years, he was also known as someone who was prone to get into a lot of fights, stemming perhaps from undiagnosed high anxiety. Today, educators would consider him twice exceptional both for his musical genius as well as his personality deficits. Growing up, however, he would have been considered “odd” for his inability to conform to societal expectations. Jeremy Lin, currently point guard for the Charlotte Hornets, parlayed his above average height into an education at Harvard and a reputation for being one of the few Asian Americans to play in the NBA. But in the Asian culture, his height made him an oddity. 

Symmetry and beauty are often associated together. The Storm Modeling agency has represented many conventional beauties such as Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss and Behati Prinsloo, all of whom have very symmetrical features. Women plagued by insecurities about their physical appearance can be inspired by British model Moffy.  She first appeared on the cover of Pop magazine in the summer of 2013. Although she has many of the features that are conventionally pleasing for a successful career in the fashion industry, Moffy is noticeably cross eyed. However, that has not stopped her from being one of the new young faces of the Storm Agency.

Almost every society values uniformity and conformity so we don’t know how to deal with things that deviate from our comfort zone. However, what is familiar can also quickly become uninteresting and be easily ignored because of that very conformity. Evenness could not exist without oddness. That which is unusual or falls outside the norm requires more work to understand and appreciate so it is not as easily dismissed.  A 2000 article in the European Review by I.C. McManus, entitled “Symmetry and asymmetry in aesthetics and the arts” https://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/reprints/2005-EuropeanReview-Symmetry_Asymmetry.pdf contrasts symmetry and asymmetry as “a struggle between two opponents of equal power, the formless chaos, on which we impose our ideas, and the all too formed monotony, which we brighten up by new accents.”  So being “odd” would actually seem to be a desirable attribute because it forces a second look at something which would otherwise be overlooked and also serves as an inspiration, compelling us to envision our world in innovative and exciting ways.

What's so odd about odd numbers? Nothing, except that we have somehow managed to convince ourselves that even is "even" better.