Michael Sieburg

BBC recently published a humorous article about baby names in China. In the past 15 years, more than 4,000 babies have been named Aoyun, or Olympic Games. Other unusual names include Space Travel, Defend China, and my favorite, Build the Nation.

I took a look to see what percentage of babies were named Olympic Games over this period. Four thousand sounds like a lot until you remember that China’s population is over 1 billion. Most statistics I came across state that approximately 20 million babies are born each year in China, so 20 million X 15=300 million. Let’s be conservative and say 250 million babies were born during this time. Thus, if you were born in China in the past 15 years, you have a 1 and 62,500 chance of being named Olympic Games, or to look at it another way, .000016% of babies born in China in the past 15 years were named Olympic Games.