The stunning discovery that 34 out of his roughly 3,000 Facebook friends, or 1 out of 87, were born on January 1st, startled one of my contacts, who also happens to be a statistics professor.
One of my friends, who is also a statistics professor, was taken aback to see that 34 of his almost 3,000 Facebook friends, or an astonishing 1 out of 87, were born on January 1st. He exclaimed, “Probability theory fails!” However, that may not be true in practice.
I am pretty sure that this might happen to many readers as well. January 1st is a day on which many people should have birthdays; perhaps this is because it is the default birth date for those who are unsure or choose not to disclose the precise day. In fact, I looked through my friend list on Facebook and noticed that there are disproportionately many people with January 1st birthdays there.
The Indian celebrities who could celebrate both their birthdays and the New Year together are Satyendra Nath Bose, Vidya Balan, Asrani, Nana Patekar, and Jyotidatya Scindia. Apparently, there is nothing special about a January 1 birthday, though. One in 365 (or one in 365.25, to be exact) people should be born on January 1 if we believe that births happen at a steady rate throughout the year, which my acquaintance indicated above may have expected.
January 1st is significant because it was the first day of the year when Julius Caesar changed the calendar, partly in honor of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, whose two faces gave him the ability to see both the past and the future. However, January 1st is only a point in the infinite hoop rolling of time as the earth revolves around the sun and on its axis; it cannot be the start or the finish of the earth’s one elliptical revolution.
Pope Gregory, however, changed the Julian calendar and made January 1 the first day of the new year. This modified calendar eventually spread throughout Europe and beyond. A number of other platforms allow users to set January 1 as their “default” birthday. As a result of this “default” logic, there are some Indian villages where the majority of the villagers, according to Aadhaar data, were born on January 1.
Kakra village in Shivpuri district of Madhya Pradesh is one such village where the majority of villagers lack any documentation proving their age. As a result, the authorities responsible for enrolling Aadhaar applicants gave them the same birth month and date. Similarly, January 1 is the birthday of the majority of residents of
According to a press release from the UIDAI, persons who do not have a supporting document or know their exact date of birth but declare their age or year of birth will accept that information and use January 1 of that year as the person’s date of birth for Aadhaar enrollment. This is not limited to India, as New Year’s Day is also the birthday of thousands of immigrants and refugees worldwide.
A few years ago, a Business Insider piece referenced US immigration data from 2009, indicating that 11,000 out of the nearly 80,000 refugees who entered the country that year had January 1st as their birthdate. This means that January 1st is chosen by default because many of them lack access to their birth certificates and because some of them fled some sort of calamity in a region of the world where birthdays are not as significant.
If you do not assume a uniform distribution of births throughout the year, that still represents an absurdly high 14%. These migrants, lacking official birth certificates, are often told to enter January 1 as their date of birth when they arrive in the US in search of asylum.In Australia, too, children of immigrants wish their parents a happy birthday in addition to a happy new year at midnight because the January 1 birthday is so popular among newcomers. In Australia, people without documentation of their date of birth were given a date, and many were made to use the first day of the year.
In Australia, the official date of birth was changed from January 1 to July 1 in 2011 due to a change in regulations. While Australians belonging to the Stolen Generation did not always have official documentation, their birthdate was July 1 rather than January 1. Nevertheless, it is understandable that in many societies, the answer to the question is not always true, and in fact, the likelihood of a January 1 birthday is much lower for a variety of reasons.
Even though January 1 is a very popular birthday for immigrants, New Year’s Day is actually one of the least popular birthdays for native-born Americans. FiveThirtyEight, a reputable polling organization, ranked January 1 as the 365th day out of 366 in the US after analyzing birth data from 1994 to 2014; it surpassed only Christmas Day. They gave a number of reasons for the popularity or unpopularity of particular dates, including parents going into labor early to avoid hospital holidays, Leap Day, or even Friday the 13th. In some other nations, like Australia, January 1 may also be among the least popular days to be born.
The first thing to notice is that very few people seem to enjoy taking time off to give birth. It is also possible that doctors would prefer to relax over the holidays rather than perform births; in Australia,For instance, Australia Day (January 26), Boxing Day (December 26), New Year’s Day, and Anzac Day (April 25) are the top five least popular days for births.
Consequently, children born on January 1st play in the same league as children born on December 31st of that same year, and even at that early age, children born in January or February, for example, are regarded as better athletes and clearly more mature physically than their younger counterparts, who are born in the latter half of the year.
Thus, they receive additional coaching and are more likely to be chosen for elite hockey leagues. Similar situations exist in many other nations and contexts, so the “default” cut-off date—whatever it may be—may have a big impact on society. In any case, I hope to see you all happy reading in the new year, and happy birthday to all of you who were born on January 1st!