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!

Triple Births

Back in 1985, my wife was pregnant with our second son, David. At the same time, my boss too of that era was pregnant with her son Matthew. David was born two weeks early at 17:54 on 6th. November 1985. Later, I found out that my boss had given birth to her son Matthew at 17:55 on the same day; the boys were born just a minute apart, both in the Hull area but at different hospitals. Some years later, David was at school and befriended a girl called Zoe in his class who was born at 10:00 on 6th. November 1985. Not really remarkable, but she was born in the USA in a time zone eight hours behind ours, so effectively was born at 18:00 GMT!! What was the chance of the three of them being born in just a six minute period?!!

Connection across the continents

I've travelled a lot during my life and had lots of coincidental meetings. This is one of the most random! After living for a few years in Japan, I moved to London where I met up with one of my best friends from New Zealand. She was working in a pub in London and invited me out for drinks with some Irish friends she'd met there. One of the Irish guys had also been recently living in Japan. That in itself is quite a coincidence - but when we compared notes we discovered we'd been living in neighbouring towns in Japan, and had both attended the same Halloween party at a club in a nearby city, Maebashi, the previous year! We'd both been in Halloween costume so we didn't remember seeing each other, but no doubt shared the same dance floor at some point during the night!

Future husband connection

My (now) husband was the friend of my friend's husband's cousin - so a very distant connection, or so we thought. The day we met, here in New Zealand, we talked about where we grew up. I told him I was born in the UK and lived in a small town, Harston near Cambridge. He shared that his mother took him and his sisters to live in the UK when he was a child - and he went to a school in a small town, Sawston near Cambridge. Sawston was where my father worked - just 5 miles or so from Harston, where I went to school! 30-odd years later we met in Queenstown, New Zealand and got married 2 years later.

Friends across the world

I am English. In 2011 I was living in Glasgow, Scotland, with a previously unknown flatmate, she was from Crieff, Scotland and was telling me she had a friend she had met while living in Palma, Majorca. He friend was from Luderitz, a small town in Namibia. So we called her "Nim". Anyhow, her friend Nim came to stay with us and we became good friends, I helped her get a job and to work in Scotland and she stayed with us for 3 years. Eventually we all moved on, and I moved to a house I bought in a small town in the other side of Scotland, called Forres. In my first month in Forres, I by chance met a man living in the town, with a Namibian sticker on his car, we spoke and I told him I knew a very good friend from Namibia, further discussion found that the man actually knew "Nim" and when I got in touch with her she confirmed that he was in fact a family friend of theirs. The man had previously lived in Windhoek just up the coast from Namibia. I found it fascinating that I met a friend of a friend from a relatively remote part of the world, in a equally relatively small and remote part of Scotland.

jean.loudon@btopenworld.com

In 1946, a teenager, my newborn daughter was adopted. I was not married. I signed away all rights of contact. I did however know the phone work number of her (adopting) father and just on forty years later for the first and only time I rang his office with some anonymous and neutral enquiry. Two days later, I learnt that he had died the day I rang.

Reading a newspaper article and relevant music plays in background

Two coincidences.. I watched Tails you win last night was living abroad during first showing .Today I was reading an article in the i newspaper about the Chancellor's announcement to close various prisons when in the pub the music playing was 'Band on the run' Wings... how uncanny is that

Scrabble

Playing Scrabble against my wife, we were nearing the very end of a game. I had seven letters left on my rack, as did my wife. I found a seven letter word ('Bingo') among my letters and could see just one place where I could put the word down on the board. But it was my wife's turn and I was hoping she wouldn't spoil my move (and end the game) by putting letters down which would stop me from playing my Bingo. To my astonishment and annoyance, not only did she put her seven letters down in the place I had wanted to go - but she put down the same Bingo!!! I would be interested to know mathematical chance of this happening.

Making friends at Uni

When I moved into university a year and a half ago, I made friends with a guy (let's call him Chris) who lived on the same floor as me in halls. Chris and I remained friends, going out and having fun, along with the rest of our group. But it was very strange when we found out that we actually lived 10 minutes apart back home and our schools were rivals, yet we had never met. Now this in itself is not that much of a surprising event but about 6 months into our uni lives, I noticed that one of my best friends who I had gone to school with (let's call him Charlie), was in a photo on Chris' facebook feed. I was quizzical but I suppose living 10 minutes apart from Chris would mean that Chris and Charlie might share some mutual friends. But it turns out that Charlie had moved in with and made friends with one of Chris' best friends at a completely different university! We thought it's not the most shocking thing to happen but it made us chuckle that we had lived so close to each other for 18 years and it takes a random chance of two of us choosing the same university and be in the same flat as each other.

Dealt full suit of cards

When I was younger my parents used to play the card game Solo ( a whist type game where all the cards are dealt, 13 to each of the four players). My mother was dealt a complete suit of hearts. Even she managed to make a Royal Abundance ! I'm not sure of the influence of the degree of shuffling or cutting though because people will follow suit to a large extent in playing the game which could lead to some dilution of randomness. Having watched the programme tonight on BBC4 my abiding thought is that these type of coincidences are inevitable and everyone will experience a few in their lifetime. This is based on t he fact that there must be an almost infinite number of ways and types coincidences can occur, as evidenced by the stories on here, so they will.

Identical random pin numbers

I ordered a credit card from Santander and when the new pin arrived it was identical to my existing RBS debit card! An easy one for your students to work out the odds :-) It sticks in my memory because the next day I randomly decided to pull in a Cafe on the A1to make a call and I pulled alongside a container lorry which just happened to have my first and surname (and it's not Smith!) in massive letters emblazened on the side!

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