Alex Bellos
speaker
186 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2014
last heard Jun 2014
Alex Bellos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The birthday paradox is probably...
One of maths' greatest hits.
It's something you can say in one line which gives you this kind of wow.
I'm Alex Belos, the author of Alex Through the Looking Glass, How Life...
I'm... With a tongue-twisting title.
I'm Alex Belos, author of Alex Through the Looking Glass, How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life.
Well, the birthday paradox is probably...
one of math's greatest hits.
It's something you can say in one line which gives you this kind of wow.
And what it is is that you only need 23 people for it to be more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday.
And this is not a logical paradox.
There's nothing self-contradictory about it.
But it goes so against sort of intuition because, you know, there are 365 days of the year.
So surely you'd need more than 23 people for it to be more likely than not that two share the same birthday.
The theoretical way to explain it using probabilities, which is not difficult but quite tricky on the radio, you can see it very clearly, it's not difficult.
But actually, I think you need to just look at the world.
People share birthdays all the time and think, oh, it's an amazing coincidence that two people in my class of 30 share the same birthday.
Actually...
With 30 people, it's 70% chance that two people share the same birthday.
Well, I thought long and hard, and then all of a sudden...
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