How likely is it that at least two people out of 30 will share a birthday?
If you surveyed 30 people, you are quite likely to have found that at least 2 shared a birthday. This is probably more likely than you think.
There are 366 possible days to have a birthday, which means the chance of any person having their birthday on any particular day is around 1/366. If you’ve only surveyed 30 people, it might seem like you’ve got a 30/366 chance of getting two people having the same birthday, which would be less than a 10% chance. However, instead of looking at individual birthdays, you should be looking at pairs of birthdays.Each person in your group could share their birthday with any other person in the group. With 30 people there are 435 possible pairs of people, and each pair has around 1/366 chance that they are both on the same day. This adds up to chance of around 70% that there will be two people sharing a birthday. You only need 23 people to get a fifty percent chance that there are two people sharing a birthday.
The birthday paradox shows that random events often bunch up unexpectedly. This is very useful if you need to work out if a list of numbers has been made up. It is very hard to make up a set of random numbers – that is numbers that have no overall pattern. This fact can be used to detect possible fraud.
In many sets of numbers, including stock prices and electricity bills, the first digit of a number is most likely to be 1. In fact this happens about 30% of the time. This rule was discovered by Simon Newcomb in 1881, and rediscovered by Frank Benford in 1938.
If a set of numbers has been made up, it is not likely to follow this rule. Investigators look at patterns of numbers to detect evidence of fraud that may require further investigation.
If you’re after more maths activities for kids, subscribe to Double Helix magazine!
Tags:
3 September, 2013 at 7:48 pm
Sorry, but could you explain how you get to “around 70%”?
4 September, 2013 at 12:36 pm
The way described above isn’t the best way to attack the problem mathematically. However, it’s a good way to see the difference between the intuitive answer and the mathematical one.
The following calculation is not rigorous, but you can still get a good estimate using this attack – we’ll calculate the chance that all the birthdays are different.
Each pair has a 365/366 chance of being different, there are 435 pairs, and all pairs need to be different. so the probability that all the pairs are different is:
(365/366)^435 ~ 0.3
So a 30% chance they’re all different, 70% chance there’s at least two people who share a birthday.
As I said, this method isn’t actually correct, but it’s pretty close. A better analysis is available on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
15 December, 2013 at 8:34 am
because if you have 23/366=50% so 30 is 23 + 7=30 so that =70%
5 September, 2013 at 4:13 pm
Thanks, quite fascinating. I knew it wasn’t simple.
31 December, 2013 at 12:40 pm
There is one thing i knew about this…
it IS a paradox…