Welcome to the first post from my new series. Here we’re going look at a famous probability question often called the birthday problem. This is actually a more general question related to the probability of at least one coincidence after a fixed number of draws from a discrete uniform distribution.
This post is part of my series Probability Questions from the Real World.
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Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics with applications in fields like physics, economics, computer programming, and many others. In particular, probability theory is one of the fields that makes heavy use of combinatorics in a wide variety of contexts.
For example, when calculating probabilities, you often need to know the number of possible orderings or groupings of events, outcomes of experiments, or generally any kind of objects.
Here’s what I’m talking about.