Youngest person in the world

Open-access content Tuesday 28th July 2015 — updated 4.50pm, Tuesday 14th April 2020

I was watching Countdown one morning (yes, I admit it), when Rachel Riley said that briefly she had been the youngest person in the world.

Taking nothing at face value, at work we had a brief interlude to ponder on this. You could divide the number of seconds in a year by the number of births in a year to get the average time you would remain the youngest. But this assumes all are born evenly throughout the year without seasonal variation.

Further, what is the probability of two, or more, being born at exactly the same time? And this assumes a universal time rather than Einstein variations. Then we went back to work.

Malcolm Slee 8 July 2015

This article appeared in our August 2015 issue of The Actuary .

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