Close Encounters
Here’s Mathematician KP Hart’s Math Question and Answer for Friday, January 8th!
How many different people will I meet during my life?
In general: How many different people will a Dutch person meet during her life? A human being is a herd animal. There are very few people who succeed in staying alone for a long time. But how many different people do we actually meet in our life? Starting from a life expectancy of 80 years. Furthermore: Meeting means for me that you know the other by name and that we communicated in “real life” with each other.
Mathematically this question looks like an earlier one: how many sandwiches are there in the world?. A nice exact answer is impossible to give but you can often give reasonable estimates using the methods of Enrico Fermi. By registering for a while how many new people you meet and by estimating how many people you already met in the past at school, in clubs, etcetera you can get an idea of how the number of encounters you will have will vary throughout your life. That will allow you to make an estimate for the total for your whole life.
It is important to realize that you will never get an exact answer, for that there are too many uncertain factors in play. It is also important that you collect data first; a calculation without data will yield very little that is reliable. This is also true for the question about the average for the Netherlands: some organisation should take it upon itself to conduct a poll and thus provide the data for an estimate of that number.
For a closer look, take a look at the post, How Many Sandwiches Are There in the World.
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Read all of KP Harts math questions here!
About Dutch Mathematician KP Hart: In the beginning of this year the Dutch government opened a website, The Dutch Science Agenda, where everyone could post questions that they thought were of scientific interest. This was an attempt to involve the whole country in determining what the Dutch science agenda should be in the coming years.
I looked through the questions and searched for terms like `mathematics’, `infinity’ … to see what mathematical questions there were and I noticed various questions that already have answers (and have had for a long time). On a whim I decided to post answers to those questions, in Dutch. For your edification I will translate these posts into English.
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