This problem has appeared in the press because of a few mathematicians, some of them considered important.
The last mathematician we watched speaking about it on TV was a professor from an English university, and that was on Australian TV.
We find http://theconversation.com/the-birthday-problem-what-are-the-odds-of-sharing-b-days-16709, however, mentioning the result in the same way.
The last mathematician we watched speaking about it on TV was a professor from an English university, and that was on Australian TV.
We find http://theconversation.com/the-birthday-problem-what-are-the-odds-of-sharing-b-days-16709, however, mentioning the result in the same way.
It is all nonsense and it all looks like a conversation of non-mathematicians.
Basically, probability brings us only the chance that something happens.
An event that has a chance x of happening, say a chance of 1 in 1000, may happen or not: We may throw the same ball on a field marked with one thousand numbers, for instance, and never get it to land on number 1, not mattering how many throw the ball or for how long.
Yet, if asked, we will say that all the people who threw the ball had 1 in 1000 of chance of getting it to land there, on number 1.
Suppose that we had 1000 people throwing it today.
Suppose we never got a single one to land the ball on number 1.
Does that defy the laws of Mathematics?
Were we all nonclassicists, like Graham Priest, we would probably get it all mixed up in the basics, and we would then start believing that the mathematical foundations are all nonsense... .
If 2000 people come and throw the ball and none of them gets it to land on number 1 even trying very hard to get that, what can we infer?
One would say: There might be something wrong with the field because 2000 have tried and nothing. That is a bit too much!
Was everyone targeting number 1?
Perhaps it is the weight of the ball or something... .
Were it a computer program, we could say that the program had been built in such a way that nobody would succeed in doing that, for instance: It is possible that the field does not allow for the ball to land there,... . It is also possible that the ball be specially prepared so that nobody get it.
It is also possible that we can predict the strength of the throw through body dimensions, for instance, and we select the people who throw the ball based on that, say nobody that can physically do it gets to be selected.
It is also possible that all is honest and nobody can actually do it, like ever.
One would definitely be forced to believe however that there is something dishonest with the ball-throwing thing by the 1000th person… .
We have 365 days in the year normally, right (http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/Year.html)?
Well, Adrian Dudek said it well: Had we 367 people then, we would guarantee that at least two of those had their birthdays coinciding.
Why 367 and not 368 in this case? Because there are years of 28th of February and there are years of 29th of February, therefore there are years of 365 and years of 366 days, this following the Gregorian Calendar, which is the one we have adopted in the United States, for instance (http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/gregorian-calendar.html).
If we have more than 31 people, we should also get a coincidence in terms of day of the month... .
More than twelve, and we should get a coincidence in terms of month… .
That is the only way we can guarantee such a coincidence, however, despite the assertions of the famous mathematicians in national and international TV and the text of Adrian Dudek.
It may happen that we get the proclaimed 27 people a few times, say ten, and in all those times we get at least two birthdays coinciding precisely. We call that luck, just like with the game Lotto and the Monty Hall Problem. Notwithstanding, we have to stop trying to make what is accurate, scientific, become something that gets the attention of the so-called uninterested or common people: It is all right to try to be popular and to try to make everyone like Mathematics or appreciate it, but it is not all right destroying our Science, make us all look like idiots as a class (scientists) just to appear on a TV show.
We have to, basically, stop with the six-degree-kinda thing (it is definitely not true that we are always at most six degrees away from each other. Please see our paper, Starants II (http://www.innovativejournal.in/index.php/ajcem/article/view/108), for some obvious argumentation).
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