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Comment by delano | Hacker News Reader

Hawking was born on what turned out to be an auspicious date: January 8, 1942 -- the 300th anniversary of the death of astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei.

It didn't "turn out" to be an auspicious date. They'd already known the date Galileo died. That it even makes the date "auspicious" is debatable. There are only 365ish days to be born on. Repeats aren't a surprise.

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It is also highly auspicious that if you sum all the letters in "stephen hawking" you get 160, which is also the sum of all letters in "extra potatoe".

Coincidence? I think not. I tried to alert CNN.com to this, but they are apparently hushing it up.

Dan?

Whoever down voted this clearly does not recall Vice-President Quayle's faux paux to which this comment refers.

I don't. What was it?

http://www.capitalcentury.com/1992.html

I like the ending.

"Now, fast forward five years to 1997, when The Trentonian decided to look up William Figueroa to see how he was doing after his hour of fame.

By then, he was a 17-year-old high school dropout who had fathered a child and was working a low-paying job at an auto showroom."

Yeah, don't call anybody an idiot for a small error...

I got the reference, I just don't find 'references' funny. I don't see it's a joke (or otherwise interesting) for a commenter to remind us, that like the parent commenter, former Vice President Dan Quayle also mispelled "potato" in 1992.

When I visited the Unix room at Bell Labs in 1993, there was a picture of Dan Quayle before a blackboard with the famous misspelling. Below the the picture was the text "My heroe -- Ken Thompson".

It "turned out" to be auspicious because Stephen Hawking wasn't born a physicist. When he became one, then his January 8 birthday "turned out" to be auspicious.

Very true. In a group of 23 randomly selected people, there is just over 50% chance that two share the same birthday. Two great articles about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html

Don't tell that to astrologers, otherwise they might make Mars align with Jupiter and that will crash your code with an unknown exception.

An astrologer may also tell you the moon is in void of course and to wait until tomorrow to make your release :]

The funniest example of how that's just probability was when this problem was discussed in my bachelor's class of about 60 people, and the prof confidently starts asking us for our dates of birth, and there was not even 1 matching pair. The probability is apparently around .01%

365! / ((365-60)! 365^60) = 0.0059

So it's about 1%, assuming uniform distribution of birthdays. Since they're not quite uniformly distributed, the actual odds of 60 people with no common birthdays is a little lower than that.

However, given the thousands of people reading HN who experienced such a classroom exercise, the odds are very good that someone like you will pipe up ;-)

We discussed this in an Algebra class during highschool--she actually sat us by birthdate. Turns out two people shared my birthday and she made us take out our IDs because she thought it was some sort of ruse. 10% of the class with the same birthday is a bit odd, but we all had fun calculating the actual odds.

Out of curiosity, how did the class determine whether anyone shared a birthday? The best way I can think of is lining up by order and then seeing if your neighbors share your birthday. Is that how you did it? Is there a better way to do it?

everyone says out their birthday in order of seating(randomly seated). If someone hears their birthday, they shout out of turn.

I guess you were expecting an algorithm faster than O(n)? That was the best we could do, given n processors with O(1) space each :-D

I think the surprise here isn't just that he was born on January 8th, but also that he was born in 1942 which made it exactly 300 years to the day.

With that said, I still don't find it to be a big deal that the date lined up with Galileo's death.

Number of famous scientists/thinkers * at least 2 (birthday, day of death, could probably include other significant days in their lives) leaves an awfully high probability that most days line up with someone famous. Divide that by the number of years people take as significant (probably any mulitple of 50) and the number is reduced somewhat but still for someone so rational it seems odd to always bring this up.

I guess auspicious in terms of he turned out to be a great physicist - and therefore the date became pertinent.

Had he been, for example, a ballet dancer it wouldnt have been quite so interesting.

Also, whilst there are 365 days to be born on how many great physicists are there? And how many are born on the centenary of a previous great physicists death? The odds for that is a lot higher than 1/365 :)

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