I’m picturing the math as a very large set of bell curves where most people fall somewhere in the middle, but each person is likely to be an outlier on at least one.
The example that comes to mind is the Birthday Problem.
If you are in a room with 22 other people, there is a 22 in 365 chance one of them shares your birthday. Relatively unlikely. But there is a 50% chance there are two people in the room that share a birthday. Much more likely.
Very interesting, that does seem similar
I don’t have an answer to your question, but a recent radiolab was dealing with this sort of stuff. Maybe you’d be interested, it might be a bit too casual for your liking, not exactly a deep mathematics podcast.
Thanks for the rec! Not a mathematician and happy to ingest food for thought npr style.
You’re welcome, I bet you’ll like it. There was actually another math one a couple weeks ago called zeroworld, it’s about dividing by zero and stuff.
