Eddie Wu

You and I, we occupy two of the birthdays.

So now it's going to be 363 out of 365.

And then the next person who comes along, 362.

Now, again, those fractions don't seem like they're going to be very small, very fast, but the more of them that are multiplied together, and the thing is, we don't often multiply 23 numbers one after another after another, so our intuition for how big or small that number is going to be turns out to be quite poor.

But by the time you get to the 23rd person,

All of those fractions reduce that number down, and you end up having a chance less than 50% that we all have different birthdays.

So therefore, the chance that at least one person shares a birthday with another ends up being more than 50%.

Again, counterintuitive and surprising.

Yes, exactly right.

And that's part of the counterintuitive part of it.

We have a bias to think about it from our own point of view.

And you're right.

If it's just me and those other 22 people or yourself, then of course, the chance is much higher that I'm not going to share a birthday with any of them.

What's the math of sunflowers?

the beauty of the sunflower, the mathematical genius of it, really only comes when you zoom in nice and close.

So if anyone gets to go into a nursery, a plant nursery, or if they have some sunflowers growing near them, or even if you just wanna go on the internet and search for a picture, do a closeup of the pattern of seeds that's on the face of a sunflower.

And one of the things you'll recognize is,

It isn't just this dark, flat area that's surrounded by beautiful golden petals.

Actually, there are tens, dozens, hundreds of individual seeds that are there all nestled together.

But this is the key part.