In this puzzle we are asking how you would find out how many people in a room might share the same birthday.
 There are many people
who have the same birthday as you. With only 366 birthdays to go around,
and over 6,000,000,000 people in the world there has to be quite a bit
of sharing. But
what if you are in a room with a few people? How likely is it that there
is at least one shared birthday? How many students are in your class?
Are there any shared birthdays? Can you find out this information for
other classes in your school?
If you’re in
a room with a group of people check to see if there are any shared birthdays.
Go around the room asking the people to say their birthdays and see if
there’s a match.
How many people would there have to be in a room in order to have a better-than-even
chance that at least two people share a birthday? In other words, how
many people do you need for the probability of a shared birthday to be
greater than 50%? How
many people do you need for the probability to be greater than 90%?
Before you try to
figure it out, take a guess. After you try this yourself, check our solutions.
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