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!

Who phone who?

I picked up my phone to call my daughter and heard someone on the line, I said Hello. Is that you mum? the voice replied. Some how we'd both picked up our phones at the same time but neither of us had time to dial each others phone numbers. How can this possibly happen?

chance discovery of parallel family

My daughter at university asked me (October 2014) to check some details about the post-graduate course she is on. A related Google search took me straight to a student society relating uniquely to that course, and I noticed that a member of the student committee (ie someone else currently on the course) had the same surname, which is not common. I looked up her details using free online birth-marriage-death indexes and found that she was born in the same medium-sized town as my daughter, some 100 miles away from the university. It turned out, that like my daughter, she is one of four sisters, who likewise were all born in this same town, and whose births were registered in exactly the same four years. We are definitely not related, do not have any particular shared (cultural, religious etc) background that would lead us to have large families and to the best of my knowledge we have never met or come across each other in any way. There are other strong parallels between the two sets of four sisters and on further research there are clear parallels between the two families over several generations, relating to key names, places and family size.

Other halves

my sister got married to a guy with 1 brother. I at the time was dating a guy I later married who also has 1 brother. Both my sister's husband and mine's father and brother have the same names.

Lotto Numbers

In 1996 my husband and I chose six Lotto Numbers 13 15 20 26 27 28 13 my daughters age 15 my sons age 20 my daughters birthday 26 my husbands birthday 27 my birthday 28 my sons birthday Since then we have had two more sons, a granddaughter and a grandson all born on 'Lotto Number' dates! 28 son 13 son 20 granddaughter & grandson None of them anywhere near their due dates either! Varying from six weeks early to two weeks late!

The postcard

In 1976 while working in Pakistan, I met a girl called Gilly S. who was the daughter of a collegue of mine. Two years later, after I had I left Pakistan and the Company, while visiting a friend in Italy, I saw that he was using as a bookmark a postcard addressed to the same girl. He had never been near Pakistan; had no idea who the girl was; or how the postcard had ended up in his book. Nonethless he made me remark that the postcard had been with him for at least five years as it showed an handwritten annotation relating an event that both he and I knew had occurred in Italy five years before.

Shark Attack

No - this is not one of those 'saved at sea from a shark' I survived stories. This involves a facebook posting about a cocktail called 'Shark Attack' (video is on youtbe). My friend posted the video showing a shot glass filled with red alcohol (Grenadine??) which is then inverted into another glass and tequila,blue curaceo and sprite added,and then the shot glass removed,to create the cocktail. Okay - so why is this a coincidence? Just before I saw the video,I had cleaned out a see-through mousse container,and was clearing up the wine glass I had used the previous evening. I noted that the mousse container fitted directly into the wine glass with room to spare,and wondered whether I could put two liquids into the same glass. Looking around for two dinstinctly different drinks,I found I had some blue bols and Cranberry juice. I had poured the cranberry juice into the wine glass,and put the mousse container into that and added the blue bols into the container.

Serendipitous Synchronicity

One day I had gotten a strong inclination to look up the word Serendipity in a dictionary to see if it might have something to do with 333, as I had been seeing those numbers surface around me. Sure enough, it did in this particular dictionary. Afterwards, I go to step outside and the next thing I notice was a van drive by with a business name along the side which was also~Serendipity!Later on that day I just so happen to notice that my friend whom I was staying with also had a bible called a serendipity bible. Which I had never heard of either!

synchrOposts on Twitter

One day I had gotten a strong inclination to look up the word Serendipity in a dictionary to see if it might have something to do with 333, as I had been seeing those numbers surface around me. Sure enough, it did in this particular dictionary. Afterwards, I go to step outside and the next thing I notice was a van drive by with a business name along the side which was also~Serendipity!Later on that day I just so happen to notice that my friend whom I was staying with also had a bible called a serendipity bible. Which I had never heard of either!

birthday coincidence

I did several paintings on art studio on my iPhone. a year later I went for therapy due to depression. At the end of the therapy which lasted 9 months, I decided to put some of my paintings on card via photo box to give to my therapist and 5 other counsellors who helped me. on the back of each card i put the date when I had done the painting on my iPhone, the name I gave each painting and my name. I chose a particular picture for my therapist that I thought he might like. He asked me when did i do the painting and I told him to look at the back for the date. he looked at it and surprised that the date was his birthday. I would like to know what the odds are of this happening. there is no way I could have known his birthday as I had not met him before and his birthdate is not accessible anywhere where I could have seen it e.g. internet.

Synchronous Dreams

Before bed on a recent business trip to Denver I was reading a book "The Self Aware Universe" which among other things discusses "Non Locality" in Quantum Physics. That night I had several vivid dreams involving a huge tree house collapsing and some sort of enormous underground labyrinth which was also partially collapsed. In both dreams I was moving about on ladders. The next morning I texted my wife at home in Seattle that I had had very vivid and strange dreams last night. (I did not share the content of the dreams) She texted me back that although she hardly ever remembered dreams she too had a very vivid dream. So vivid in fact that when she got up in the night to go to the bathroom she turned on the light to avoid the ladder she dreamt was next to her in bed. Non Locality indeed! Where is Karl Jung when you need him?

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