Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about the

extreme weirdness of the birthday paradox. Then you'll learn about the hidden science of

LED lighting with help from one of the pioneers of LED's George Crawford.

Let's satisfy some curiosity.

I've got a puzzle for you.

If you gathered a group of random strangers into a room, what are the odds that any two share

a birthday?

Better yet, how many people would you need

for there to be a 50-50 chance

of there being at least one shared birthday in the room?

Well, I'll give you a hint.

It is not nearly as many as you think, and that's why this problem is called

the birthday paradox. So let's set this up. As with any thoughts experiment,

we first need to address our assumptions.

First, let's assume none of the people are twins and their birthdays are completely random.

So what's the answer? Well, the number of people you would need for there to be a 50% chance of a birthday match is 23.

That's right, I know there are 365 days in the year and this sounds impossible, but it's 23.

Please don't get mad.

Here's how you figure this out.

Let's say I'm person A and Ashley is person B.

The probability that Ashley and I share a birthday is a one in 365 or about a 0.003% chance.

...