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!

Same dates

My son was born at home on February 9 in 1969. The midwife who brought him into the world was born on February 9 also, as was the maternity help who arrived the next day. </p> <p>My mother died exactly 100 years after my father was born, on December 19, 2002, which was also the day her own grandfather died in 1930.

Meeting a girl in the same town with the same birthday and year

I met a girl out in town who shared my birthday down to the year, we were both born on the 30th January 1973 and would make us both 41 now, i find this extremely bizarre as we got chatting and there was an instant attraction there and we have remained in contact and we still talk about it even curious as to what the odds of this would be.

Same job, same London flat

At work there were just two other people with the same job title as me in a large organisation. Talking to one of them, who was at least 10 years younger than me, about areas of London we'd lived in, we found out that we'd lived in exactly the same flat about 10 years apart. It wasn't close to the place of work and each of us had moved in only because we had known someone else living there (not a mutual acquaintance).

Birthday Coincidence

Last year I went to dinner with a friend for her birthday. She had invited 3 other women, none of whom I had ever met. Since it was a birthday dinner we were talking about our birthdays, and we found that 3 out of the 4 of us invited shared the same birthday. Not year, only month and day, February 1st, but it was still very coincidental! Angie

7

I was born on the 27th of the 7th 1942.My housenumber was 7.On the 7th of the 7th 1987 I survived a head on collision in which I broke my neck, and according to my doctor very lucky to have survived.Unbeknown to me my present partner watched me being wheeled into A&E.She was in the hospital waiting for a bed for her husband. He died a few hours later.We met a few years later and were both astonished at the coincidences of sevens.I had divororced and moved into a house numbered 107 and my partner lived in No 7. We now live in No 62

Beyond mere coincidence

I moved across the US 3,000 miles away from a small obscure town in California to a small obscure town in Maryland. On my very first day I went to a local supermarket two miles from the house and as I was walking in the store a man walked out who I recognized. He was a former co-worker who I had last seen two years prior in that small town in California. We were completely floored to see each other.

Places I lived.

1. I was waiting in line at hardware store in Houston when a long plank someone had leaned against the counter slid down and bonked me on the head. I had to sit down for a minute, stunned. After a few minutes, the cashier said he had taken the name and address off the check of the customer whose plank it was (in case i wanted to pursue it, although it should be store responsible, not the customer). I did not want to, but I took a glance at it-- the address was an apartment building I had previously lived at, including the same apartment number. 2. I met a girl in a bar and we were chatting. We found out that we had both lived in a 4-apt. building called the Red Barn (shaped and painted like a barn) and in the same exact apartment. 3. I rented a place in Birmingham that later I found out from my mother that my parents' close friends had lived in when we were little children and I had played in that apartment. 4. When I was 12, my tennis teacher married my piano teacher and moved into my old house (which had previously been sold to someone else).

Confused

I was driving along and stop just before the lights which was red, I was playing a particular song on my CD then out of the blue a individual walked in front of my car and came to my window which was open at the time and dropped an album inside at first i thought it was something dodgy, i looked to see where the person was but he had disappeared when i picked up the album it was the person i was listening to on my CD.

mr

i had the same 3 images used in a text love affair some 10 years ago, as my wife used in a recent on-line love affair recently, not just similar but the exact same items

Synchronicity

Whilst researching Carl G Jung and synchronicity for my dissertation, my husband turned the TV on and the program mimicked the exact same words As I read them in perfect synchronisation....the contexts of my reading and the TV program were entirely unrelated...but the string of words were exact....very odd! I took it as a good omen with regards to my writing.

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