After being assured that I was more likely to get struck by lightening, I won the lottery on Saturday. Well, I won £10, at least.
It got me thinking about the likelihood of things.
In probability theory the birthday problem, or birthday paradox is the probability that in a set of randomly chosen people some pair of them will have the same birthday. In a group of 23 (or more) randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will both have been born on the same day. For 57 or more people, the probability is more than 99%, tending toward 100% as the pool of people grows. The mathematics behind this problem leads to a well-known cryptographic attack called the birthday attack. Pow pow! Someone always bakes a cake here when it’s someone’s birthday and in our charity of 40 people, there are a pair with the same birthday, fancy that. Ker-slam!
Unlikely ways, to do die are “geographic tongue”, no it’s not some sort of Gaia’s revenge on carbon rich backpackers. It’s a disease in which the raised lesions on the tongue look like the contours of a country, 1,700 people per year die of it.
Also 17,000 people since 1900 have died by toothpick. Enthusiastic hors d’oeuvres eating, will no longer be an amuse bouche.
And finally, back round full cycle, According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (American) your overall odds of being a lightning victim are 1 in 280,000,000. I wonder if there’s less chance of getting stuck in the states, with all that open space, that’s, well, not a human.
HA, I knew it, 14,000,000 to one, with such good odds, better get those numbers in quick for next week.
What unlikely things have happened to you?
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One Response to “Maths problem”
Posted: Aug 12th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Not a “same birthday” story but close - At a previous job, I was chatting to one of the girls in the office and discovered that we had been born within two days of each other.
Now, bear in mind that I’m Irish and this lady was Palestinian… As the conversation progressed we also discovered that, not only had we been born within two days of each other, we’d also been born in the same hospital, which had only opened the summer we were born (maternity ward being the first ward up and running), and whose parents had both left the UK soon after our birth.
It struck us as funny because, all these years later, we had both migrated back to London and ended up working in the same place.