New Hire at work with same initials

[kreskin]

Yesterday we hired someone new at work and their initials are IC. We currently have two other people employeed here with the same IC initials. There are 80 people that work at my company altogether.

My question is what are the odds of three people having the same initials in a company of 80 people?

Thank you.

 

[mmm4444bot]

Calculating accurate odds can be tricky. You need a sense of the potential possibilities.

Can you tell me how many first names there are in the world that begin with the letter I ?

Can you tell me how many last names there are in the world that begin with the letter C ?

 

[kreskin]

A valid point. Obviously some initial combos are more likely to come up that others. But, just to make things easy - let's say each letter has an equal chance of coming up.

 

[Deleted member 4993]

Yesterday we hired someone new at work and their initials are IC. We currently have two other people employeed here with the same IC initials. There are 80 people that work at my company altogether.

My question is what are the odds of three people having the same initials in a company of 80 people?

Thank you.

A valid point. Obviously some initial combos are more likely to come up that others. But, just to make things easy - let's say each letter has an equal chance of coming up.

Exactly where are you stuck?

Please share your work with us - so that we may know where to begin to help you.

 

[kreskin]

There are 676 different initial combinations.

If there were 3 people in the company 1/676 * 1/676 * 1/676 would be the easy answer to figure out.

I am having trouble how to factor in the probability, with X number of employees. In this case 80.