KASARGOD : Three siblings - Mohammed Sarfaras (18), Muhammed Shamnas (15) and Mohammed Nabeel (10) - have “a problem” with their birthdays.
They stumbled on it while celebrating the youngest brother’s 10th birthday on May 13, a Friday. Sarfaras found that his birthday on September 2 also falls on Friday. Shamnas checked his birthday, April 29. Again, it was a Friday.
The three children immediately hit Google and checked their birthdays, said their parents N K P Suhara and Abdul Razak, residents of Olavara near Trikaripur in Kasargod.
The result baffled them. “Every year, their birthdays fell on the same day,” said Suhara.
Sarfaras, a class 12 student, said they checked the calendar from 1900 to 2050. “The birthdays fell on the same days,” he said, not holding back the mirth in his voice. The days are same even in a Leap Year and after that, he said.
Razak said Sarfaras, the eldest was born on September 2, 1997. It was a Tuesday, he helpfully added. His second son, Shamnas, was born on April 29, 2001, a Sunday; and Nabeel was born on May 13, 2006, a Saturday. “We added the numbers in our dates of birth and got a sequence of 10, 9, 8,” said Sarfaras. That is the closest they could get to explaining the “magic” behind their “baffling find”. Happy Mathday.
Number of days in a week multiplied by number of weeks in a year, that is 7*52, is equal to 364 days, leaving one day extra. That means you birthday would shift by one day each year, and by two days in a leap year. Sarfaras was born on a Tuesday in 1997. 2000 was a leap year. When the second brother, Shamnas, was born after four years in 2001, a Sunday, Sarfaras birthday shifted by five days to also fall on Sunday. After five years, their third brother was born in 2006, on a Saturday. Again, since 2004 was a leap year, the birthdays of two elder brothers shifted by six days from Sunday to coincide with Nabeel on Saturday in 2006. “This is a coincidence where the birthdays of the siblings fall on the same day to start with. The probability of it is just over 2 per cent,” said Ali Akbar, assistant professor, Department of Mathematics, CUK.