by Athena Appleton » Monday 26 April 2004 10:40:59pm
There's not really a concrete way to do the math, really... there's a swing of about 700 students by different people's estimaguesses.
We know that there are "several hundred" (that is mentioned) and that the Great Hall is huge.
We know how many Gryffindor boys and how many Gryffindor girls there are in Harry's year only. So lets say you take the number in Harry's year and multiply it by the number of years and the number of houses, you get....
Harry, Ron, Neville, Dean, Seamus, Hermione, Parvati, Lavender multiplied by 7 (the number of years in Gryffindor) multiplied by 4 (the number of houses), you get a total of about 225 students total. Not quite "several hundred".
It could help to take into effect that the sorting may not be done on an equal basis (more people may be put into Hufflepuff than Gryffindor, for example) and also that there may be more 3rd years than 5th years, etc. When Lily became pregnant with Harry, Voldemort was reaching his height of power. Few people may have wanted to bring children into a world of Voldy terror. Also, since the students at Hogwarts aren't representative of all children (only those with the special ability to perform magic go there) it's likely it would be much less evenly spread out than, say, a boy/girl ratio at a regular school.
I usually imagine somewhere around 350-400 students at Hogwarts. I think it was Aberforth who said he assumed there were closer to 1000 students (which would mean there were WAY less Gryffindors in Harry's year than other years and other houses).