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A print ad (for Loving Embrace pendants) used my name, Jennifer and my boyfriend's name, Matthew in their sample pendant. What are the odds that those two names would be choosen? Howmanyofme.com shows that there are 1,521,455 Jennifer's in the US and 1,075,792 Matthews.

It doesn't have to be perfect; I'm just going to send him the advertisement with a note and would like to let him know what the odds are that we'd be paired together.

Jenicol
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Assuming that the probability of them picking your names out of all the available names for your gender is equal to the frequency of your name in the population of women/men (probably not a great assumption but it makes use of the data you gave!) and using the first figures on google that came up, that there are $157$ million women and $151.8$ million men in the US, the probability of both your names being chosen is: $$ \frac{1,521,455}{157,000,000}\frac{1,075,792}{151,800,000} \approx \frac{1}{14561}$$

Note answer for entertainment purposes only :)

spaceisdarkgreen
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  • As your disclaimer suggests, this is an estimate of the probability that, when picking a woman and a man at random from the US population, their names are Jennifer and Matthew. Whoever prepared the ad probably chose from a small set of popular names. – Fabio Somenzi Jan 31 '18 at 02:24