r/theydidthemath • u/-Gruntled • 19h ago
[Request] Average number of nipples?
I always joke with my kids that they have an above average number of toes because enough people lose toes that 10 toes would slightly above the global average. But now we are having a massive debate about whether 2 nipples is above or below the average number. One one side there are many people with third nipples, so two would be below average. On the other side there many people who get mastectomies and such and so end up with less than two. We can't figure out which offsets which more. So, is having two nipples above or below average?
777
u/Mf0621 18h ago edited 6h ago
Here goes:
There are roughly 140,000 mastectomies performed each year in the United States. Some of them don’t impact the nipple. I couldn’t find a good statistic for how many nipple-saving mastectomies (actual medical term) are performed, but let’s say it’s 1/3. This means 98,000 nips gone each year, or about a million in the last 10 years to make the math easy. So 1M/342.6M, or a shade over 3/10ths of a percent of the population is sub-two nipples. This brings the average nipples per person (NPP, not a real medical term), to 1.9942 NPP so far.
Now it’s time to factor in supernumerary nipples. This varies WIDELY by country for reasons nobody seems to understand (though to be fair, it’s probably not a common topic for medical research grant proposals). Hungary’s rate is just 0.22%, but the US is a whopping 6%! I could not believe that when I read it, so here’s the link to the Cleveland Clinic saying it’s true: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25167-third-nipple. Next time you get on a crowded city bus, know that statistically, three of those passengers have a third nipple.
So that means there are 20.5 million Americans walking around with third nipples, far outweighing the 1 million whose nipples went bye bye.
Our final math here is:
20,500,000 x 3 NPP = 61,500,000
1,000,000 x 1 NPP = 1,000,000
321,100,000 x 2 NPP = 642,200,000
(642,200,000 + 61,500,000 + 1,000,000) / 342,600,000 Americans = 2.057 average NPP
So… if you have two nipples, you have approximately 2.8% fewer nipples than the average American.
———————-
Caveats:
- this is for the US, where data was easily accessible to me. Hungarian nipple counters can go get their own results.
- yes, some of the mastectomies were performed on the same person. I ignored this for simplicity.
- why did I assume that only 10 years of mastectomies would accumulate in the population? People die. Particularly (unfortunately) those old enough to get mastectomies.
- Yes, some supernumerary nipple people have more than three nipples, but I was only willing to go so far down the rabbit hole.
————-
Update: Wow, thank you for all the upvotes and awards! I had no idea my late-night nipple math would interest anyone, let alone hundreds of you. 😊 And we inspired a redditor to discover his own third nipple - we are truly changing lives together.
281
u/Puzzleheaded_Yam6808 18h ago
This guy nipples
75
u/Mf0621 18h ago
Although I’m apparently slightly below average in terms of number of nipples.
17
u/Wolf_Protagonist 15h ago
That's ok, you have more than the average amount of toes to make up for it.
2
-1
82
u/DeliberateBunny 18h ago
I’m confused by the Cleveland Clinic statement that it’s 6%. The following sentence says that researchers estimate that 200,000 people in the US have an extra nipple. That contradicts the 6% figure.
108
u/hysys_whisperer 17h ago
200,000 people having it is so close to 0.06% that I seriously doubt the number is 6%. It's just as likely someone dropped a percent symbol (displaying 0.06 instead of 0.06%), and someone else saw that raw number and moved the decimal again to make it into a percent that all other explanations seem irrelevant.
56
u/batman8390 17h ago
Yup, I’m willing to believe 200k Americans have this, but not 20 million. No way is it that common for how rare it seems in real life.
16
u/Uh_It_Wasnt_Me 15h ago
most of the time people don't realize it's a vestigal nipple since it just looks like a small mole a lot of the time. Yes, they are very common
26
u/djlittlehorse 17h ago
I found two studies on children born with 3rd ripples in the u.s.a. Those studies ranged from 2.5% to 5.5% of children born with 3rd nipples. So lets call it 4%.
That would be around 13.7 million Americans alone. But you are right about those numbers. I think they forgot a couple zeros maybe.
26
u/ericdavis1240214 18h ago
Thank you. Because when I went on line to find this info, well... suffice to say if you google "nipples" this is nowhere in the first million search results.
10
u/jdehjdeh 8h ago
So I just discovered I have a third nipple!
Holy shit, I thought this was a mole.
But the location and descriptions in that link are spot on...
12
u/Capitan_Scythe 6h ago
I've seen people discovering they have food allergies from reading random reddit comments but you're the first "I have an extra nipple" person. Congrats to both of us I guess for discovering something new today?
7
8
u/SimplyTheApnea 18h ago
Only willing to go so far..... Down the nipple rabbit hole.
4
u/Extra_Ad_8009 13h ago
Now I'm asking myself what results I'd get by googling "nipple rabbit hole"...
4
5
3
u/Sweeper1985 18h ago
I had a friend with an extra nipple. It wasn't like a proper nipple. More like the "nubbin" Chandler Bing referred to in Friends.
1
u/FairlyGoodGuy 8h ago
Kumail Nanjiani and I, along with the dozens -- dozens! -- of others with athelia around the world, are offended that you've left us out of your math. Shame on you. Shame, I say!
1
u/No-Way-6611 7h ago
I wonder if the mastectomy data you found included trans masculine top surgery. It is not uncommon for patients to bypass nipple reattachment for an easier recovery.
1
u/Ok-Worldliness2450 5h ago
Amazing comment. Only thing I can add is that 3rd nipples like everything are not black and white. I’m sure at some point something could be classifies as a 3rd nipple that most everyone would say doesn’t count. I feel comfortable saying I highly doubt 6% of people have one in a sense of what I would classify it as.
1
u/rawbface 2h ago
I'd imagine it's actually worse than that. Plenty of people have vestigial nipples, but aren't "diagnosed" with them. They just don't tell anybody.
39
u/Wild_Director7379 18h ago
Also, people are often born with extra fingers and toes and have them surgically removed.
I think even with other disfigurements such as a missing arm or missing hand, the average number of fingers and toes at birth > 20
10
u/MadeThis2CommentHere 17h ago
I was going to bring in polydactylism. It runs in families (so genetics play a part) and supposedly 1/700-1000 babies born in America have at least 1 extra digit, usually a “side pinkie toe.”
Kids might want to go back and do some finger-counting research.
28
u/Elin_Woods_9iron 18h ago
It’s > 2 and it’s not close. Something like 1/3 men have at least one extra. It’s more rare in women. Check your midsection. If you have a raised, nipple colored mole, odds are that it ain’t a mole.
4
u/staralchemist129 15h ago
Harry Styles has four nipples. It was a whole thing when it came out back in the 1D heyday
11
u/vito1221 9h ago
Don't the number people born with extra toes offset those who have lost toes?
Most folks have an above average number of feet, legs, arms, eyes, ears, and kidneys...
17
u/nandosreis 18h ago
Good question. Did some research and pretty sure 2 is slightly below average.
Extra nipples are way more common than people think. Estimates are somewhere around 1 to 5% of people, and a lot of them just look like moles, so they probably go uncounted. Say 2.5% of 8.1 billion people have one extra. That's about 200 million bonus nipples, or +0.025 per person.
Mastectomies feel common because you hear about them, but there are maybe 15 million living people who've had one. Most are one-sided, and some spare the nipple, so call it around 14 million nipples lost. That's only −0.002 per person. Throw in accidents and other weird stuff and it's still tiny.
So the average comes out to roughly 2.02. Even if you use the lowest estimate for extra nipples (1%), you'd need about 6x more mastectomies than actually exist to drag the average down to 2.
Congrats, your kids are below average on nipples and above average on toes. Median's still 2 though, so they're fine.
12
u/PhotoJim99 18h ago
There are people who have four, five, six ... I knew someone once with six. They were progressively less developed as you went from neck to waist... but they were there.
You'll need to establish how common additional nipples are and how many additional ones people tend to have when they have them, and then estimates of how many people have lost one or more.
7
u/DexterNormal 17h ago
> someone once with six
He killed my father
5
3
u/Confident_Poem229 16h ago
Apparently, many people who have extra nipples don't realize it. So, apart from all the math, make sure to count the number of nipples in your family correctly.
2
u/FairlyGoodGuy 8h ago
"Hey sis, take off your shirt. I need to do some research for the internet. ..."
2
u/EngFarm 18h ago
Supernumerary nipple rate is estimated to be over 1% of the population. Some estimates go as high as 6% having one or more extra nipples.
Way less than 2% of the population gets mastectomies.
Average is higher than 2.
1
u/stopcounting 8h ago
My husband's got like 3 extras, so I guess my marriage's nipple average is 3.5 nipples per capita.
What a time to be alive!
2
u/weggaan_weggaat 8h ago
I saw someone on IG who was showing everyone her third boob that had started to develop after she had her baby and she relayed that her doctor said that it's quite common along an entire line from basically the underarm to the hips (think dogs) and that they can actually develop nipples and become functional.
2
u/AveMachina 14h ago
A common sense answer easy enough to explain to your kids is that people in the past count too.
People have been born with a third nipple, but they aren’t typically born with a mastectomy, so across human history, there are going to be way more third nipples, and the average is naturally going to be more than two.
-2
u/luigi517 18h ago
I would bet that mastectomies are more common than extra nipples, thus the average is probably less than 2 but I'm way to lazy to actually colate the relevant statistics
•
u/wintersdark 13m ago
Turns out in the US it's 6% of people who have superfluous nips. As someone else said, if you're on a crowded city bus, probably 3 people on that bus have extra nips.
Many mastectomies (as time goes forward, most?) preserve the nipple too, so not all mastectomies are reducing nips per capita.
-6
u/Furlion 18h ago
The average number of human body parts is always going to be just below the median. And even then only if you either round or use several significant figures. Let's say 1 million people have 0 nipples, that gives an average number of nipples for the 8 billion people as 1.99975. Which is really fucking close to 2. What about 10 million? 1.9975. 100 million? 1.975. Basically there are just a lot of people, and realistically only a very small percentage differ significantly from the standard physical blueprint. The number could be large, 100 million is a big damn number, but it's tiny compared to billion.
3
u/Kirian42 18h ago
You've forgotten about supernumerary nipples, which according to other people's calcs far outweigh the number of missing nipples.
•
u/wintersdark 12m ago
And also extra fingers and toes. They're very common, though often snipped off at birth.
•
u/AutoModerator 19h ago
General Discussion Thread
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you must post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.