The Weekend Edition Saturday Math Guy, Stanford professor Keith Devlin, has a problem. In fact, he has more than one... which he's happy to share with Scott Simon. What is the probability that in a ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Minding the collision of business, energy, science & the environment. It's a popular exercise in statistics and probability: How ...

Here's a fun brain teaser: How large does a random group of people have to be for there to be a 50% chance that at least two of the people will share a birthday? The answer is 23, which surprises many ...

Statisticians who study coincidences are fond of saying that ordinary people don’t know how to estimate the probabilities of coincidences. To illustrate our poor statistical thinking, statisticians ...