Meeting a Stranger With Your Birthday
Meeting someone with the same birthday as you is always exciting, but it isn’t exactly rare. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed to happen in certain circumstances. “Mathematicians call this ‘the birthday problem,’ and they usually phrase it like this: How big of a group of people do you have to assemble before there’s a 50-50 chance that two of the people share the same birthday?” explains Ana Swanson of The Washington Post.
“If you assemble a group of 366 people, there’s 100 percent probability that two people will have the same birthday—since there are only 365 days in a year, excluding leap years,” she continues. “But the probability is still almost certain with a much smaller group than that.” And speaking of leap years…