The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

Ask someone who the greatest football player of all time is and a lot of people who know better will say Jim Brown. The Sporting News voted him the best player of all time in a 2002 poll as evidence of that claim. Jim Brown was born on February 17, 1936. By the way, Jim Brown is also considered by some to be the best lacrosse player ever. He was an All American in both football and lacrosse at Syracuse University.

The best basketball player of all time is Michael Jordan. This claim is more widely accepted as true and doesn't really need any proof (despite my own claim that Magic Johnson is the best player ever.) Michael Jordan was born on February 17, 1963.

It's pretty interesting that two guys who are considered to be the best to ever play their sports have the same birthday. Incidentally, February 17th is also Paris Hilton's birthday. I don't know if she's a prodigy at anything.

In case you were wondering, Wayne Gretzky's birthday is January 26, 1961 and Babe Ruth's birthday is February 6, 1895. All of these guys birthday's are within a month of each other. Certainly that's not particularly significant, but I'm not sure if it's even interesting.

All of this in some way relates to the birthday problem, also known as the birthday paradox. The idea here is that if you have as few as 23 people in a room, there is a greater than 50% chance that two of them will share a birthday. Once you have 60 people together the chance is greater than 99% that two of them will share a birthday. This goes against intuition, but makes a lot of sense once you realize that the number of possible combinations of 23 people is 23C2 = 253, it starts to come together more easily.