ELi5: what’s the birthday paradox ? And is its mathematical basics a correct proof?
In: Mathematics
It is the birthday problem since it is not a paradox. The basic problem is to find out how many people is needed for it to be likely that two of them share the same birthday. The chance of two people having the same birthday is one in 365. So you would expect that you need a lot of people to find two that shares birthdays. But it turns out that you only need 23 people. This is because you are not just comparing two peoples birthday, you are comparing all pairs of people among the 23. We do have the full mathematical understanding of this so we can calculate this quite accurately. This problem does appear in several different applications.
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