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| | Illuminations: Birthday Paradox |
 | | Students can then run calculator-based simulations of the birthday paradox and can explore the fact that more than 50 percent of the time, when groups of "random" strangers are assembled, only twenty-three persons are needed to find a matching pair of birthdays. |
 | | For example, in the birthday paradox, a group of twenty-three randomly selected persons must be selected to have a greater than 50 percent chance that any two of them share the same birthday (Lesser, 1999). |
 | | The probability that two strangers do not share a birthday is 364/365, assuming that neither of them was born in a leap year, with the probability of a match being the complement of this event, that is, 1 -(364/365), or.00274. |
| illuminations.nctm.org /index_d.aspx?id=299 (1961 words) |
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