2005-11-21

What Are The Odds?

There are currently eight people in the office where I work. Last week we discovered that I have the same birthday as G. That can't be likely.

But R and H also share a birthday, and R2 and H2 celebrate just one day apart. If any budding statisticians want to have a stab at calculating this probability, I'm eager to know. Eight people tried on Friday but were too busy laughing to see it through.

posted by thisismarcus @ 10:15 

3 Comments:

Blogger The Paranoid Mod said...

Apparently there's a 50/50 chance that 2 in 23 people will share a birthday, but 2 in 8 sounds less likely.

This looks useful,
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rajm/tscoin.htm
but I already spent 3 years doing maths at uni and I'm not about to do any more...

12:46  
Blogger Major Rakal said...

My birthday was the same as two other people in my department at Cornell. Granted there were a lot more than eight people, but the other two were a supervisor and one of his supervisees (so there's two in the same small unit), and the supervisee and I also shared our birth year, i.e., we were born on the same day (kind of like twins already separated at birth). I'd wager that that's a lot more unlikely than just having the same month and day.

nraioex

18:53  
Blogger thisismarcus said...

Apparently there's a 50/50 chance that 2 in 23 people will share a birthday

Mod: I have some friends that are too shy to leave comments and one just said something that made me doubt your factoid. Apparently the odds of two people on the same pitch on the opening day of the football season sharing a birthday is very high. That's 23 people including the referee, but with 15+ matches being played simultaneously that's not the same thing as 2 in every 23 people sharing a birthday. FYI!

15:37  

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