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!

stars foretell

Simultaneousl coincidental reading of news paper astrological reading with a nescently developing friendship revealed that both shared the same Zodiac sign. Also it predicted meeting a platonic friend and establishing a relationship for next two to three months. It characterised the relationship as one of the most important in life. This was in the year 1971. It reflected the mood and was true for duration. Culminationof the relationship in separation was due to the normal wordly factors.Yet there remained lingering feelings and some some longings for keeping the bonding more cemented. After 30 years gap , in the year 2007, one of the partener could gather some clues about the other from a random meeting with a stranger and considered reviving contacts. This was considerd unwise and abandoned but revived again by a strong prodding from the weekly news paper forecast which said about the parterners equal desire to meet. When the contact was revived the weekly forecast had predicted "working wonders in love life and some one meeting and complementing on the day.

German teachers that knew each other

I went to a German school in Mexico. But during my schooling, i took part in a year-long student exchange programme when i went to Germany. Over there i was taught art by this lady teacher. On my final day at school, she asked if she would be seeing me in her class, the following year. Whereupon i explained to her that it was my time to go back to Mexico. When she heard "Mexico" her ears pricked up and she said that a former boyfriend of hers had flown out years ago to become a German teacher there. Lo-and-behold he was a German teacher of mine!

The girl I like

I had not seen the girl I liked for months. Then, I bumped into her by coincidence for three days in a row. On the first day, I was walking to university and passed her while she walking with friends on a busy road. On the second day, I passed her again on a small street while walking back home. She was with a friend again. On the third day, I was going for a walk, and I passed by her swimming with friends. I tried my best to avoid her since she might have thought I was doing it on purpose.

Third time lucky

My first boyfriend had a grandmother that lived in Minehead, Somerset, my second boyfriend's father had served on HMS Ark Royal, my third boyfriend, who later became my husband had a grandmother who lived in Minehead, Somerset and his father had served on HMS Ark Royal. I always felt that i was working my way to the right man and no i didn't live in Somerset i lived in Staffordshire.

Meeting strangers twice in different places

On one family holidy in the Lake District in the erly 80's we met a family on Helvelyn who we had previously met that summer in France. We had never met them before or since. On the same trip we met, on Langdale Pikes, the person who had just interviewed my mum for a job back at home over 100 miles away (she didn't know thatn, but she'd got the job).

Mark Thomas - close to the speed of light

Yesterday (25/9/13) I watched Brian Cox in Science Britannica,online he said he had made a mistake during his piece on the LHC.It turned out that he had missed 4 nines from the decimal percentage of how much the particles at the LHC were accelerated of the speed of light. Whilst the missing 4 nines represent small fractions,the speed of light is so large that the missing digits represent quite a large missing chunk. I remarked on Facebook,making a joke about the missing digits,taking a snapshot of what I had said for back reference. The same evening I was trying to recall the name of the comedian who had taken a balloon over the governments communications spy centre as a protest against covert communication monitoring,I thought he was called Mark something...and tried to hunt him down online. This failed - but I recalled by myself eventually that his name was Mark Thomas. Today, (26/9/13) I found it necessary to look for the snapshot I had taken of my joke about Brian Cox's missing 9's,but could not find it,so I went back to Facebook to generate a new copy,searching for where he had mentioned his mistake.

Holiday meeting

When I was 11 we went on holiday to Majorca and I made friends with a girl who was staying at our hotel for the same week(at half term). We were from different parts of the UK and didn't keep in touch. The next year we went on holiday to Yugoslavia (during a different week in the summer) and the girl and her family were staying in our hotel again!

Relations

In 1973 my wife and I first worked together for the Arts Council in London. Just before I was about to leave my job and travel to Australia to spend time with my parents who had gone there to live a few years before, my wife and I became romantically involved. Suddenly being in love I questioned whether I should go to Australia. I wrote to my parents explaining my dilemma. Although not having worked before soon after arriving in Australia to live my mother had got a job working in a small office. She had been there for 2/3 years. In the office were a couple of other women. On getting my news my mother mentioned my romantic involvement to one of the other women. 'The girl's called Fiona. She works with him at the Arts Council.' 'That's strange,' the woman responded. 'My cousin Fiona works at the Arts Council in London.' So the coincidence was that my mother and Fiona's one cousin who had moved to Australia 30 years before worked in the same small office for 2 years before we became involved. This unknown to either Fiona or I beforehand.

A life full of

My birthday is January 27th making me Aquarius in zodiac sign. My address is 27 Waterman i.e. auf deutsch Wasserman = Aquarius. I have a Grand cross in my natal chart, and after many years of association with the church of Saint John the Baptist i.e. a Waterman/Aquarius figure, I discovered and interpreted a monument there with four figurines which correspond in their esoteric symbolism to the Fixed Cross of astrology. After the shock of a immersion heater exploding i sat down to read 'David Copperfield' the chapter was entitled 'I take part in an explosion'. Once, when sitting in a woods with a girlfriend i said, 'I wish i had something to give you', my hand then slipped into some ivy at the base of a tree and pulled out a paste-diamond hair-clip. Sat down on a fallen tree in a woods to open a book and read the words, 'A fallen tree lays where it fell'. Gave a big paperback book of CD reviews to a friend, a few days later a neighbour visited with a present he had acquired for me from a charity shop, the very same book.

Found my family boat!

When I was growing up in Los Angeles, my family had a sailboat named the "Sweet Pea". It was a Morgan 27'. For a variety of reasons, my father sold it when I was ~12 (in 1980) to someone and it disappeared from our life. 5 years ago, or 27 years later, I was on vacation in Seattle and took my family to visit the Chittendon Locks (I love feats of engineering!) that connect Lake Union with Puget Sound. As I was excitedly explaining to my 3 young children how a lock works, I pointed in the distance to a line of boats that were heading towards the lock to exit to the Sound. As they approached, I commented that there was a boat that looked like the one I grew up with. When it was even closer, I was able to make out the color--a thick green strip at the water line--and began to get excited. Sure enough, when it got close enough, I saw the name on the boat. Sweet Pea! Since boats virtually never get renamed as it is "bad luck", I am very confident that I found the very same boat that had left my family so long ago. In thinking about this, it is not much of a coincidence as I first imagined.

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