A generalization of the Birthday problem and the chromatic polynomial

Abstract

The birthday paradox states that there is at least a 50% chance that some two out of twenty-three randomly chosen people will share the same birth date. The calculation for this problem assumes that all birth dates are equally likely. We consider the following two modifications of this question. If the distribution of birthdays is non-uniform, does that increase or decrease the probability of matching birth dates? Further, what if we focus on birthdays shared by some particular pairs rather than any two people. Does a non-uniform distribution on birth dates increase or decrease the probability of a matching pair? In this paper we present our results in this generalized setting. We use some results and methods due to Sokal concerning bounds on the roots of chromatic polynomials to prove our results.