It's something of an urban legend here at Miami University in Scenic Oxford, Ohio that there are more students named "Katie" here than there are minority students. This legend 1) emphasizes the popularity of the name "Katie" in a pejorative way ("everyone is named Katie; you're un-original") and 2) simultaneously emphasizes how few minority students there are here (if a single name can have more representatives than an entire marginalized group of people, what does that say about us?).

University Communications maintains that this is untrue. So, with some help from my friends at the Support Desk, I set out to find the answers to this enigma.

I started by finding out how many "minority" students there were at Miami. The word Miami uses is "multicultural" students, and it reports that "[m]ulticultural students comprise[d] 8.7 percent of students in 2003-2004 on all three campuses." We then discovered that there were 15,300 undergraduate students and 1,400 graduate students on the Oxford campus, and 2,200 students on the Hamilton and Middletown campuses, for a grand total of 18,900 students. After dredging the abacus out from the sub-basement, we discovered that 8.7% of 18,900 is 1,644. Using Miami's numbers, then, there are 1,644 multicultural students on all three campuses.

Next comes the magical command-line voodoo that resulted in the following numbers for people with the following names:

• Katherine - 269
• Katie - 57
• Kate - 56
• Katy - 6

All variations that could lead to "Katie" add up to a paltry 388 students, only 23.6% the amount of multicultural students. Furthermore, due to limitations to our commands, "388" is the number of any person with a university account who has any of those expressions in her name. 388 isn't even the number of students; it's padded by faculty, staff, and emeriti.

It appears that University Communications was right, after all; there aren't more Katies than there are multicultural students. The only name that comes close, actually, is "Michael," which returned 1,239 results. How many people do you know named Mike? How many do you know named Katie? How many do you know that are getting married to each other? Trippy, isn't it? Here are some other fun numbers to tide you over until dinner:

• Catherine - 151
• John - 868 [may include last name with "John," i.e., "Johnson"]
• Jon - 390
• Mark - 268
• Matthew - 588
• Luke - 25