If you listened to episode 3.13, “On the Rhodes Scholarship and Making Yourself Useful,” you heard Notre Dame’s newest Rhodes Scholar, Prathm Juneja, blow our minds with a probability theory known as “the birthday problem,” which gets into how many people it takes to reach a greater than 50 percent chance of two of them sharing the same birthday.
Spoiler alert: It’s not nearly as many as you might think.
For those wanting to dig into the birthday problem a little deeper, check out this 2005 story and five-minute clip from NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.
It’s a fun look inside something that’s sure to be a conversation starter at your next brunch—or more accurately, your next Zoom.