Leap Day Birthdays
In my Leap Day contribution to the New York Times Learning Network, “10 Activities for Learning About Leap Year and Other Calendar Oddities,” I calculated the odds of a person having a Leap Day birthday.
Assuming each day of the year is an equally likely birthday, and noting that there is one Leap Day every four calendar years, I calculated the probability to be
P (Leap Day Birthday) =
or around 0.7%.
So how many people with Leap Year birthdays do you know?
2 Comments
ihor · March 1, 2012 at 5:03 pm
This reminds me of the classic birthday problem where you need only 23 people in a room for there to be about a 50% chance of a match. So how big a stadium, country or continent do you need in order to have enough room for the number of people you need to get a 50% chance of sharing a leap birthday? Hmmm let me think about that one. 🙂
Great website!
MrHonner · March 1, 2012 at 7:10 pm
I also was thinking about how the classic birthday problem fits in with rarity of the the leap-day birthday. And then I saw this story about a mother and daughter who were both born on leap day!