# Facebook Birthday Problem: Part 1

The “birthday problem” is one of the classic problems in elementary probability because of its counter-intuitive solution. From Wikipedia:

In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are only 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people. These conclusions are based on the assumption that each day of the year (except February 29) is equally probable for a birthday.

Recently, I devised the following different birthday problem:

Suppose that you have n friends, and you always say “Happy Birthday” to each friend on his/her birthday. On how many days of the year will you not say “Happy Birthday” to one of your friends?

Until somebody tells me otherwise, I’m calling this the Facebook birthday problem in honor of Facebook’s daily alerts to say “Happy Birthday” to friends.

In this series, I will solve this problem. While this may ruin the suspense, here’s a graph of the solution for $100 \le n \le 1000$ along with error bars indicating two standard deviations.

Before deriving this solution, I’ll start with a thought bubble if you’d like to take some time to think about how to do this.