Newton College

IB Mathematics Standard Level Internal Assessment

Exploring a solution to the Birthday Paradox when applied to
different societies

Figure Shows a group of individuals in a room

Name: Alvaro Magallanes

Mathematical Investigation
Session: November 2017
Index:
1. Introduction
1.1.History page (3)
1.2.Aim page (3)
1.3.Personal Engagement.. page (4)
2. Explanation of the Original Formula page (4)
2.1.Calculate the probability of a pair sharing
birthdays.. page (4)
2.2.Approximation of number of people needed page (5)
3. Exploration of Romulus Calendar
4. Exploartion of Tzolk'in Calendar
5. Exploration of Pawukon Calendar
6. Conclusion
7. Bibliography..page (9)
1. Introduction:
1.1.History:
Throughout history we have seen many attempts to try to find the probability the that, in a
set of any given number of randomly chosen people, a pair of them will share their
birthday. This question would become the Birthday Paradox. What started as a simple
mathematical question soon became a matter of investigation by many mathematicians
which couldnt precisely find an equation that solved the problem. After many attempts,
mathematician Martin Gardner found the following solution to the birthday paradox:

Figure 1.1 Shows Gardners formula presented in Mathematical Games for the Scientific American

n: Number of people in any given set

p: Probability of
n: No birthday shared

Disclaimer: The original Solution will be further explained in Section 2 The Original
Formula.

1.2.Aim:
The aim of this investigation is to demonstrate the variations in the original solution of the
Birthday Paradox when applied to the calendars of different to the following calendars:

Calendar of Romulus: A 304-day calendar first introduced by Romulus of Rome

around the year 700 BC. The calendar consisted of 10 months of 30 and 31 days
each.
Tzolk'in Calendar: A 260-day Mesoamerican calendar introduced 13 cycles
(months) of 20 day each. The calendar was used by the Mayans and its even still
used by some tribes in Guatemala.
Pawukon Calendar: A 210-day based on the Hindu religion of Bali Indonesia. In this
calendar, the months (bulan) are made up of 35 days thus making a year 6 months
long. The calendar is still used in Bali.

The purpose of analyzing the number of people needed on a room in order to get a 75%
probability of at least a pair sharing a birthday, is to see the transformation of the current
equation and create a new equation to solve the birthday paradox for the aforementioned
calendars.

1.3. Personal Engagement:

As an IB student I decided to connect this mathematical investigation to other subjects
that Im currently taking in the second year of the Diploma. As a History student, I learned
 that during the French Revolution the government changed the calendar the commonly
used Gregorian calendar to a Thermidorian one which consisted of 10 day weeks and 3
week months. These changed the total days in the calendar to 360. I immediately
wondered how will this affect the birthday distribution of the French citizens. Coming back
to Maths, the investigation links to Unit J of the syllabus Probability. I wondered how
much will the original solution to the Birthday paradox would change with these new
variables, so throughout this investigation I will try to solve this intrigue.

2. Explanation of The Original Formula:

2.1. Calculate the Probability of a pair sharing birthdays
Martin Gardner presented in his column of the Scientific American his solution to the
birthday paradox in the standardized Gregorian calendar. Although he didnt take in
consideration many real-life variables that make the Birthday distribution. Such as leap
years and the fact that the distribution is not unformal as there are many factors such as
holidays that affect it.

According to the Theory of probability, to discover the probability of an event

occurring you need to divide the total number of successful outcomes by the total
number of outcomes. Gardner took an innovative approach as the main goal is to
find the probability of a pair sharing a birthday, he used the following Probability
principle:

Figure 1.2 shows the Probability of event A ocurring

P(A): Probability of a pair sharing a birthday

P(A): Probability of a pair not sharing a birthday.
In order to find the probability of a pair not sharing a birthday we must first take in
consideration our sample space, there are 365 days in the Gregorian calendar
(excluding the leap year) so our total number of outcomes is: 365. In order to find
our total number of successful outcomes we will create a set of n number of
people, in this case this set will be a room. As an example, Ill use a set of 23
people.

When the first person enters the room he/she can have his/her birthday at
any day as there is nobody else in the room. So, the probability of him/her
sharing a birthday with someone else is:
365
o =1
365
As we keep adding more individuals to the room the possible number of
birthdays available when no-one in the room shares a birthday decreases
until we reach the number of people in the room, in this case 23:
 365 364 363 343
o 365 365 365 = ( )
365
o ( ):
The aforementioned theory can lead to the creation of the two following
equations:
365!! 1 365!
o = (365) (365)!
365
o : .
o < 0, 365
In this investigation, I will use the second formula as it simpler to use to
explain the theory. Going back to our example thanks to the original theory
the common known solution to the problem is that you need at least 23
people in the same room to have a 50% probability of a pair sharing
birthdays. I will now demonstrate by solving the formula:
1 365!
o ( ) = (365)23 (365!23!)
365!
o ( ) = 1.167519432 343!
o ( ) 0.492703
o DISCLAIMER: All of the working out made with scientific calculator
will be shown in the appendix.
Now that probability of a pair not sharing a birthday we can now use this
information to find out the probability of a pair sharing birthdays with one
of the fundamentals principles of the theory of probability, which states:
the probability of an event happening is equal to 1 minus the probability of
the event not happening 1 represents 100% of the event happening.
o () = 1 0.492703
o () = 0.507297 = 50.7297%
I challenge that I faced while trying to prove the formula was that the
graphic calculator that my school recommends us to the Casio fx-9860GII
didnt had the capacity to process 365!, so I had to make the logical
assumption and had do it by hand and by rearranging the fraction.

2.2. Approximation of number of people needed

I will now explain how the second formula that Im going to use in this
investigation. This formula was also presented by Gardner in his Scientific
American column. The formula is used to find an approximation of the n
number of people needed in any given set (in this case a room) to have an x
probability of a pair sharing birthdays. The original formula presented was:

Figure 1.3 shows the formula to calculate the approximation of the number of people needed to have a 50% of
two people sharing a birthday.
 The presented formula was used to find the number of people needed in
order to have a 50% probability of a pair sharing a birthday. As
demonstrated in section 2.1. this number can be rounded up to 23. In this
formula, many variables have been given a numerical value, for a better
understanding of the formula I will explain what each of the numerical
values means:
1
o : Represents the probability of 2 people sharing a birthday
2
o n: Number of people needed in a room to have x probability of a
pair sharing a birthday.
o 365: The days in the Gregorian calendar (excluding the leap year)
o 2: The number of people sharing a birthday
In order to make this formula more suitable for the investigation, I decided
to re-write it for a more straight-forward approach when applying it to the
calendars mentioned in the aim as many variables such as the number of
days change.
1
o + 2 ln(1)
o n: Number of people needed in a room to have x probability of a
pair sharing a birthday.
o x: Probability of a pair sharing birthdays
o a: Number of days in calendar
To prove the validity of my equation I will try to find the number of people
needed in a room to have at least 75% probability of two people in the
same room sharing birthdays.
1
o 0.75 + 2 365 ln(10.75)
o 0.75 + 1011.99488
o 0.75 + 31.81
o 32.56
o = 33
Weve arrived at a decimal answer, as a rule because you cant have .56 of a
person we always round up. I was able to compare my results to those of a
reliable webpage named Better Explained to find out if my formula
actually works. The webpage allows you to input any number of individuals
in a room and calculates the probability of a pair sharing a birthday in that
set. As we have arrived at the estimation that 33 people are needed to have
a 75% probability of a pair sharing a birthday, we can put input that we
desire to find the probability of two people sharing birthdays inside a group
of 33 individuals into the webpage software and compare it to my results.
 Figure 1.4 shows the probability of a pair sharing their birthday according to Better Explained Birthday Paradox calculator

We can see our approximation is close to the real probability of two people
sharing their birthdays in a group of 33 individuals. Our estimate was that at
least 33 individuals were needed to have a 75% probability of two of them
sharing birthdays, our statement is true and our approximation is only
1.51% less than the real probability.
Because the real probability was higher than my estimation, I had to input
the probability of two individuals sharing a birthday in a group of 32
individuals. If the real probability provided by the Better Explained
calculator was 75% or higher it would have disproven my formula.

Figure 1.5 shows the probability of a pair sharing their birthday according to Better Explained Birthday Paradox
calculator
We can see from the results that the probability of a pair sharing birthdays
in a group of 32 individuals is 74.35%. The fact that this probability is lower
than 75% proves that my approximation was accurate as in order to have a
75% or greater probability of two individuals sharing a birthday in a group,
the group must be at least conformed of 33 individuals.

Sadly, I couldnt find a similar type of calculator that calculated the number
of individuals needed in the group from the probability desired and that
gave me a decimal answer. Because of this I will never truly know how
accurate my decimal prediction of 32.56 individuals was.

Now that we fully understand how both of the formulas that I will use in my
investigation work, we can proceed to explore the changes in the formulas and find a
new solution of the birthday paradox when applied to the 3 calendars we will use of
this investigation.

Bibliography:
https://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-birthday-
paradox/#Appendix_B_The_General_Birthday_Formula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

http://calendopedia.com/balinese.htm

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-roman.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzolk%27in