Happy 200th birthday, Abe Lincoln. Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin.
Now, I’m not really any good at math. I think it’s the reason I’ve never been able to finish Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein. Or understand magazine articles about card-counting. Or why, on those occasions when underwriters have explained mortgage amortization to me, all I ever heard was the sound of my blood pounding in my ears. So I don’t really grasp what I’m about to convey to you. But get this:
In any random group of 23 people, there is a 50 percent chance that two of them will have the same birthday.
Now, how the hell is that true? I don’t know. But here is the explanation as it appears in Wikipedia, with some it written in Greek letters, just to add that really persuasive, really confounding element that shoos away the dubious and confused.
But what I really want to know is this: who were the other 21 people in Lincoln and Darwin’s group?