MATH 1040 Introduction to Statistics Spring 2019

THE BIRTHDAY PARADOX

By: Rachel Barton and Gerald Brady

What are the chances that you will share a birthday with someone? How about not
sharing a birthday? What is the chance that 2 people in your office or classroom will share a
birthday? What if your office or classroom have 23 people in it?
Let’s start by answering the question about 2 randomly selected people in your office or
classroom sharing a birthday. The 1st person gets the benefit of celebrating on any day of the
365
calendar year (ignoring Feb 29). Their birthday probability is 365. A 2nd person comes along, and
because we want to know what the likelihood is that they will share the same birthday as the 1st
person, they only get 1 day out of the 365. That is, their birthday must be the same as the 1st
1
person (365). The likelihood you share a birthday with someone is 0.274%.
365 1
(365) × (365) = 0.00274

Now what is the probability you do not share the same birthday with person 1? The rule
of probability is that the probability of an event occurring plus the probability of the event not
occurring is always equal to 1.
P(Event not occurring) + P(Event occurring) = 1
We can simply solve this by subtracting the probability that you do share the same
birthday from 1. (1 - 0.00274 = 0.99726 or 99.726%). This makes since as now person 2 is not
restricted to just 1 day in the year but from the remaining 364 remaining days that are not person
364
1’s birthday (365).

The birthday paradox explains that you only need to select 23 people to have a 50%
probability that at least 2 people will share a birthday. Our brains logically think that we would
need many times more people in order to have such a high probability. One would think you
would need 366 people to ensure a high level of certainty since there are 365 days in a normal
calendar year, but the formula indicates you only need 57 people to have a 99% probability of 2
sharing the same birthday.

100%
Birthday Paradox

80% Chance of
Not Sharing
a Birthday
60% 50.73% with
23 people
Chance of
40% Sharing A
Birthday
20%

0%
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61
MATH 1040 Introduction to Statistics Spring 2019

Using the probability rule of either event occurring being a certain outcome, we can
365 364
calculate that none of them share a birthday. The first gets any day (365) , the second gets (365),
363 362
the third gets (365), the forth (365) and so on. This results in the following:

365 364 363 362 343

(365) × (365) × (365) × (365) ×. . .× (365) = 0.4927
The probability of no one sharing the same birthday is 49.27%.

Knowing this, we can subtract from 1 and find out what the probability that any 2 of our
23 people could share the same birthday. (1 - 0.4927 = 0.5073 or 50.73%). This is known as the
compliment rule of probability.
A simplified formula for this is available to find the probability of any number of people
NOT sharing a birthday utilizing permutation. This is finding all possible outcomes out of 365
days for n people to not share a birthday.
It’s like saying in our problem: out of 365 days choose all possible ways that 23 people
can have a birthday. This is then divided by all possible outcomes (36523 ). Using the
compliment rule (1 - the probability that they all do not share the same birthday) we get the
probability that 2 would share the same birthday.
This can be used for any number of people and easier to accomplish with software or a
calculator with permutation functionality. So how many people would you need for a 100%
probability that 2 people would share the same birthday? Only 120 people are needed.