Quote:
Originally Posted by Echodork
Well, I can tell you that this isn't true. To have a 100% chance of duplicate birthdays, you'd need 366 people (not counting leap year birthdays). The math is a bit tricky and I don't feel like working it out right now, but I'm willing to accept that 30 people have a 90% chance for duplication
I think the forumula for finding the probability of a duplicate birthday is:
1 / (1/365 + 1/364 + 1/363...1/n-1) where n is the number of people in the room. I'm not sure, and that tends to disprove the theory that 30 people have a 90% chance, since using 30 for n results in a chance of about 9%, not 90%. But I got my degree in psych, any math students out there want to comment?
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It's a well known math problem known as the "Birthday Problem" - the number of people you need is a logarithmic function.
http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/reese/birth...planation.html for more information, or Google.