Matt Parker
speaker
278 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2010
last heard 8 Jul
Matt Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So the BBC appears to think the only crime is to be a non-existent public relations... Yeah, given you exist, you can make up some data and that's fine, I guess.
Pleasure as always.
Well, I approached this problem the way most people approach a probability question.
I broke it down into little bits, worked out the probability of each, and then multiplied them all together.
And our basic unit we're looking at here is the probability you have a dad whose name is John Charles.
And we are, of course, assuming that the dad's name is John Charles' generic surname.
so I had to work out the odds of someone being named John Charles.
And in terms of dads, I'm going to assume that people who are dads, of people who would then be at a dinner party, that they're going to be distributed around the 40s and 50s in terms of births.
Now, I looked into the statistics, because you can download them from the Office of National Statistics.
In the 1940s, John was the single most common name to give a boy, and in the 50s, it was the second most common name to give a boy.
Charles, however, comes in at about the 38th most common name.
Even though I could get the rankings, I couldn't get the distribution, so I compared this to modern names, and currently, the most common boys' names account for about 2% of all births, and the 38th most common names are about 0.6%.
And so if you take your 2% and your 0.6%, the probability, in general, your dad's name would be John Charles, is about 0.012%.
If you've got five people, or with their dad's name, John Charles, multiply those together, and it ends up being a probability of one in about, well, 40 billion billion, which is a ridiculous number.
Even if you had nine million dinner parties a day since the beginning of the universe, we would have only just had 40 billion billion of them.
Something's gone wrong.
In fact, there are two things that have gone wrong with this approach to probability.
You can't assume things in the real world are independent.
And if you look at names, the names are not independent.
People with different family backgrounds tend to choose different names.
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