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!

House of coincidences

1. I was talking to the singer next to me in a dressing room in Paris and she told me her mother lived in a house in London that had an evil bloodhound that hid behind the gate of a neighbouring house and jumped up barking every time she passed, scaring the life out of her. Sensing the coincidence (how many bloodhounds are as mean as this?), I asked what her mother's address and yes, it was my mother's dog. 2. I met a lady at a friend's concert and she invited us to her place for Sunday lunch. I excused myself as I was due to have lunch with my mother that day. However, she gave me her address in case I changed my mind. It turned out her place was in the same street as my mother's, in fact just opposite.

Mobile Phone Numbers

A few years ago I tried to call an old, female, friend on her last known mobile number. We'd been out of touch for about 3 years. A male voice answered, so I said, "I assume that's not Louise?" He laughed, I apologised and put the phone down. Assuming I had dialed the wrong number I tried again and the same voice answered. "That's still not Louise, is it?" "No. Is that Uncle Stewart?" I had called my nephew. In the years since I'd last been in contact with my friend she'd changed her mobile number and my nephew had become old enough to have a mobile of his own and it seems as if he'd been issued with her recycled number.

Family co-incidence

This actually is more my elder daughter's coincidence. A few years ago she had been touring in Morocco with her current boyfriend. On their way home at holiday's end they crossed into Gibralter and checked into a hotel. The first night in the bar they came upon a group of British seamen. In conversation my daughter remarked that she had a cousin in the navy, and gave his name. "Just wait there" said one of the lads, went upstairs and came back with my nephew, who had been asleep in his room. He had spent a couple of years on a nuclear submarine, which had just returned from a visit to Australia. Neither he or my daughter had any knowledge of each others' movements.

Met the Same Man at the Same Place After Years Later

When i was in holiday I met a guy in 2003, he's from a different country. After he returned back to his country and i went back to town, we were in contact for a while. After one year or so we lose contact. In end of year 2008 I suddenly decide to take a holiday at the same place. And I accidentally met the same guy again, same place. We both so surprised for this coincidence.

Oxford Phenomenon - systematically reproducible coincidence.

Every Friday and Saterday during 2006-2008 TESCO part-time trader attracted from 5 000 to 10 000 people per day. All attempts to explain, to control or to stop it were unsuccessful. Human activists, UFO hunters, mana theorists and sceptical customers collected the most precise statistics of such phenomenon day- per- day 2006-2008. Statistics in particularly suggests that this kind of impossible concidence has a similarity with so-called macroscopic quantum-like games where winner has a sort of quantum device against classical players... Being anthropologist I described such phenomenon in article published in Los Alamos e-prints arXiv ( Popov M.A. P vs NP problem in the field anthropology - arXiv 0904.3074 (2009 ))

Unknown family member

I was in Port Elizabeth South Africa, some friends who have a holiday home just outside the town invited me for a short stay. They organized a barbeque for friends and neighbours whilst I was there and I got chatting to one them, a woman a few years older than me. I started chatting about my fathers stay in Port Elizabeth during the war, he was a merchant seaman who escaped the fall of Singapore and had some adventures before landing up in PE. I also recounted the story of receiving boxes of sweets from South Africa during sugar rationing, a shoebox full would arrive every two months and dad insisted that I shared them with the other children in the street. I felt the atmosphere cool. Names were mentioned and it turned out that the sender of the sweets was the woman's mother, a strange coincidence, made even stranger when she told me she was my half sister. It turned out that the woman was very angry about the situation and left almost immediately and I have heard nothing since.

Mr Edward Leonard

In 1983 I bought a book called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. About a year later I lost it. Twenty eight years later, on the 11th of August 2011, I went into the British Heart Foundation shop, in which my daughter works, I picked up a copy of the book I lost and bought it. When I opened it I found it was the actual one I had lost all those years ago. It had my signature and year of purchase on the inside cover. A few days later I met a friend of mine and was telling him about this coincidence when he told me that I had loaned him the book back in the eighties. He in turn loaned it to one of his work mates who he met recently and had informed him that he donated it to the charity shop.

International Phone Call

Back in the 1980s I was working in IT in France. I had a direct line to my office to which only 2 people knew the number, my French wife and an American colleague in the N. Carolina. When the phone rang one evening I answered "Hello" and when a female voice responded "Hi John", I knew it wasn't my wife. After about 1 minute exchanging the usual banalities about the weather we both realised that neither of us was talking to the person we expected. She was in New York ringing an English friend, also called John, had dialled the wrong French number. but had received the English greeting she was expecting!

Meeting someone with the same name

I have a fairly common name and have often come across people with the same name, but hardly ever met one face to face. Once I was mixed up with another customer at my bank who had the same name. In the 1990s I worked in Bishopsgate, London, and joined a swimming pool where we had membership cards with photoes on them. We had to give in the card when we went to swim and collect it as we left. Once I arrived, handed over the card and the receptionist looked at it and said - this isn't you! He looked through the other cards he had and found mine -the same name but a different picture. I had been given the wrong card the last time I had swum but had not checked it, and never saw what my namesake looked like! I must have been swimming at the same time and never knew...then I wondered if she was the same one who had a similar bank account and if we had been tracking each other for years. I also met someone recently at an Antiques Fair who was a dealer, as I had been in the past. She accused me of causing confusion because when she had booked her place, they thought she was me.

romac

I was six years old. I had recently started going to school for the first time (my parents had been abroad). Getting to the school involved taking two buses - for the first, into the city centre, my mother accompanied me - she would then leave me in the queue for the second bus, giving me two pennies for my fare to the school and back (yes, this was a long time ago). In the afternoon she would travel into the city centre to meet me off the bus. One morning she forgot to give me the two pennies - I didn't realise until I was on the bus, and all I had with me was a single penny, which I gave to the conductor. I don't think I've ever felt more desperate than I did that morning - I just couldn't imagine how I could get home at all without my bus fare - I was scared of the teacher and never even thought of telling her - in fact I didn't tell anybody - I was very new at the school and didn't know anybody to tell. At break time, I was standing watching a group of older girls play Oranges and Lemons.

Pages