About Coin Toss Day

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The coin tossing is rumored to have started with Julius Caesar, who, when stumped by a decision, would leave it to the fate of the gods by flipping a coin. Render unto Caesar thy luck? It was his face on the coin! This style of determining a yes or no question, or who wins or loses, continues today.

People don't make important decisions by a coin toss, do they? Yes, they do, including:

a) How Portland, Oregon, got its name

b) Who owned what would become the fastest racehorse in history, Secretariat

c) Whether Wilbur or Orville Wright would take the first flight

d) Who boarded the plane in 1959 that crashed and killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. Richardson, "The Day the Music Died."

e) The path to the discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting came down to his winning a coin toss against Clark Noble to become Frederick Banting's assistant in 1921.

A coin toss can also refer to tossing a coin in a fountain to make a wish, as is the legend of the Three Coins in the Trevi Fountain. For the wishes to work, you must throw either one or three coins in the fountain.

If you toss just one coin in the fountain from the right hand over the left shoulder, your wish to return to Rome will be granted.
If you toss a second coin, your wish for a new romance will materialize.
Your third toss ensures your wish for a future marriage will come to fruition.

Each year the city of Rome earns over one million Euros from the coins tossed into Trevi.

There isn't a historical tie between a pivotal coin toss and June 1, so LEEP dug a little to see if perhaps it might be the day Arthur Dempster, Nan Laird, and Donald Rubin published their Expectation-maximization (EM) Algorithm, a mathematical theory with coin tossing at its center, in 1977. It wasn't. Then we thought maybe it was one of their birthdays or death anniversaries. Nope. All three are still alive and well. June 1, it's not even the mid-point of the calendar year, so it isn't numerical. Therefore Coin Toss Day appears to be just that—a day to toss a coin.