Cambridge Coincidences Collection

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

Well I Never!

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

English Literature's Fieldings & Joneses

“Of course, billions of such coincidences take place in the world every second. I dream of writing a big book: The Theory of Chance.” – Milan Kundera “In any event, whether it was a matter of one in a million or one in a billion, the meeting was absolutely improbable, and it was precisely this lack of probability that gave it value. For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.” – Professor Avenarius Cosmic coincidences, rhyming events, “miracles” are fated to occur in our universe. Coincidences have to happen, otherwise we wouldn’t be here to remark upon their remarkableness. Our universe would not exist if not for a singular cosmic event, the Big Bang, along with a succession of climatic events that produced the galaxies of stars, our solar system, life on Earth, & human consciousness. Fortuitous meetings have led to grand discoveries & inventions.

Consecutive double yolks in Turkey on Easter Sunday

What to make of the succession of seven double-yolked eggs out of a total of ten I broke open when making scrambled eggs on Easter Sunday in Turkey twenty years ago? Turkey is sometimes referred to as the “Other Holy Land” because of the seven churches of Asia Minor that are mentioned in the New Testament Book of Revelation. Was that supposed to be significant to me an agnostic? “In England, a man went to the store and bought a package of six eggs. He cracked the first one open and found a double yolk. Then he cracked open the second, two yolks in that one as well. It turns out all six eggs were like that. The chances of that happening: about one in a trillion. As unlikely as winning the lottery, the man said, before adding the lottery would be better, obviously. Still, what a way to beat the odds with eggs?” “[T]here is a theorem in science: if it happens, it must be possible,” remarked Richard A.

College associate

While on duty as an Army enlistee specialist in Bangkok in April, 1968, I was greeted at an Army office by an Army Major I last spoke to in the ROTC office at the Pennsylvania college from which I graduated in May, 1967.

Not so eerie but left us with a strange feeling

On a road trip in Colombia, South America, with a cousin, I got the driver's seat for a short while because my cousin had been driving for a long time and needed to rest. It was dark, the terrible road had many potholes that you had to sort out by driving fast avoiding the largest and hitting the rest. Not long after I was driving I turned right on a fork and about half mile later I hit a pothole so badly that it busted the right hand side front tire and damaged the back one as well. We got out and started to change the tires, luckily my cousin had a pump to fill the back tire until we could get somewhere. Suddenly, out of nowhere comes a jeep. If you know that part of the country, you should know that no one stops to help people because it can be very dangerous. At that time, you would have gotten mugged or robbed or kidnapped. An any rate, the guy seemed very nice, like a peasant. We didn't ask him to stop. He just stopped, rolled down his window and asked us where we were heading. When we told him where (the town of Neiva) he replied: "Turn back and at the fork take a right".

9/11 Magazine Ad

About a month after the World Trade Center terrorist attack I was leafing through PC magazine at work and came across an advertisement for Yahoo Finance. The ad showed an old photo of the financial district of Manhatten with most of the recognizable skyline but conspicuously did not have the Trade Towers in the image. The ad said, "Feel Left In" and I supposed the the gimmick was to show an image where something was clearly left out -- the trade towers. The date of the magazine was August 2001. Not only had the magazine come out a full month before the trade towers were destroyed but one can realistically assume that the idea for the ad had probably been determined much earlier. I have copies of the magazine ad (but don't know how to include it in this writing." It was PC Magazine August 2001.

My Improbable French Bestie

I started to really work on improving my very rudimentary French skills a few months ago and I started using a phone app called Hellotalk which pairs you up with French speaking people who are trying to learn English. I started making friends with people all over the world, having basic multi-lingual chitchat with people in places such as the Ivory Coast, Algeria, Morrocco and of course France. One morning as I arrived at work, I received a message from someone new who wrote that they were from France and they were working as an Au Pair in Australia. After chatting we realised that we were in the same suburb of the same city less than 2 miles away from each other! I know for a fact that I don't share my location with the app and the only information it has is that I'm Australian. We soon met up and became friends after that. She believes in fate and says there is some reason behind us meeting, I don't but to me it's an outrageous fluke the likes of which I've never experienced in my life.

Online dating historic connection

A guy "superliked" my sister on Tinder - by accident, it turns out - and when she found out his history, we realized he had had dinner at our house 25 years earlier, in a city 400 miles away. Maybe he subconsiciously recognized her, but I doubt it.

Ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in 20 years

I was standing by a cafe near UC Berkeley thinking of a friend I had in the 80s, who I hadn't seen since then. She lives in San Francisco. I turned and she was walking down the street toward me.

unlikely meeting

In Nov. 2013 my wife and I were in the middle of a 6 week road trip (from Boise, Idaho) taking a day hike in Jedediah Smith Redwood Park in northern California. The trail was a loop and we saw very few people. But in the middle of the hike we did run into a couple we knew from Boise. We weren't good friends but the husband and I had spent the previous year working quite intensely together on a non-profit reorganization so it felt more remarkable (even if it wasn't). So 600 miles from home in the redwood forest we meet friends from home. And it was a loop trail so if either couple had gone the other direction we wouldn't have seen each other. Not magic but pretty amazing. On the ranking scale below I would put it somewhere between *once a year and **once in a lifetime - maybe a few times in a lifetime.

relativity

While driving from Raleigh to Southport, I thought I was making pretty good time as the traffic was light and it's interstate most of the way. But by the time I was on the last stretch, NC 133,the River Road along the Cape Fear, thinking I should be only ten minutes away, I realized it was actually 20 min. or more to my destination. I then mused about the recent discovery of wave in the space/time continuum and how I had "slipped" through some anomaly in time. Just after this thought there appeared a billboard off to the right on the next stretch of highway. The billboard had a large black&white image of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. I laughed bemusedly.

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