Commentary: Birthday Match Probabilities Spreadsheet

 

            This is one way to use a spreadsheet to set up the famous problem about figuring out the probability that with a given number of people in a room, at least two will have the same birthday.  The probability that all people have different birthdays is computed recursively; the numbers in the leftmost column facilitate this computation, and then the second column is used to generate the other probabilities.  The last column is the rate of change of the column before it; hence the top graph is the derivative of the bottom graph.   8/05

 

 

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