Over 100,000 people turned 52 yesterday ... my husband was one of them.

So my husband and I are perfect together .... but sometimes he is really a nerd.

So I say to dear husband last night something about how special he is because today is his birthday ... and he replies that he's not so special as lots of people were born on this day. I say yeah, but not so many are turning 52 .... so then he proceeds to calculate an estimate of how many people in the world celebrated their 52 birthday yesterday. You gotta love him. He is a piece of work.

First he had to list the assumptions -- some of which we realize are false, but make the problem too complex to do a simple estimate and they aren't false enough to make a significant difference for purposes of our discussion:

• 6 billion people in the world



• Youngest 1, Oldest 100



• Constant distribution of current ages from 1 to 100



• Same rate of death from 1 to 100



• Constant distribution across specific days of the year - in other words we are not taking into account seasonal spikes in birth rate

Then to do the math in his head:
There are 365 days in a year, over a hundred years that is 36,500 possible different birthdays. Divide 6 billion by 36,500 .... he rounded to be able to do the math easier and came up with 100,000 as the number of people celebrating their 52nd birthday with him.

I just did it on the calculator and its actually 165,000 for each day. Which is actually only 0.0000275 % of the total world population so ... I think I am right and he is still pretty special!