Yesterday, a crazy coincidence happened. Four out of the seven people in our office wore basically the same shirt.
We snapped this picture and left it at that – funny coincidence. Until we received the below message from Jake (third from left) at 12:03AM:
So I started thinking about how I would figure out the odds of this happening—let’s suppose we each have ~20 shirts that we wear to work, and each we have to pick one at random, and four of those have to be the same—the odds of that happening are about 0.000081, which takes into account the fact that Troy and I wear the same shirt a lot, and while there are technically 400 ways to pick 2 shirts randomly out of two sets of 20, he and I wear the same shirt about once a month. (I consulted with a friend who was a math major in college.)
But even that doesn’t give the whole picture, because you also have to know what the likelihood of four people buying the same shirt are…this is a little less complicated than it sounds because we could categorize most button-down shirts into probably 5 basic patterns and 8 colors…
My friend, the math major, said I should just wait and see when it happens again. It might only take 3 decades—maybe around the time I retire.
(It’s also more significant that it happened in such a small office—at a 20-person company, you might expect two people to wear the same shirt almost every day, but they’d also be less likely to sit or stand near to each other and notice!) Aren’t statistics interesting!
Thank you, Jake’s math-y friend!
