Instead of featuring a particular birthday person today, I have a very unusual set of coincidences to report. I get birthday information from Wikipedia, which has a page for every day of the year listing events, births, deaths, and holidays around the world. Because there have been a lot of years for people to be born in, and 365.25 days in each of those, it’s unusual to have duplicate birthdays for people prominent enough to have their own Wikipedia page. But today…something very odd seems to have started around the 1940s, because on June 29, 1944, four different people were born and got famous. Two more in 1946. Four in 1948. Three in 49. The pattern continues into the 1950s:
1950, 53, 54, and 58 each have two famous birthdays today
1956 and 1957 have, sort of astonishingly, five each.
The coincidences continue; there’s a set of four birthdays in 1981, and several sets of three.
Then I looked further back…and found five June 29 birthdays in 1925, and 1919, four in 1926, and so on. Evidently this is just a 20th Century phenomenon, though, because in the 1800s there are only four years with two famous birthdays today.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that if you take 23 people at random, there’s more than a 50% chance that two of them will share a birthday. But that’s the day of the year, not the year. Anyway, if today is your birthday, start working on your wikipedia page so it’s ready when you get famous!
