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!

Birthdays

I played bridge regularly with three other ladies. Between us we had 13 children and the number of coincidences in their birthdays and in our parents' and husbands' and our birthdays seems amazing. I share a birthday, Jan.10th, with a player's daughter My twins share a birthday, March 3rd, with another player's son My daughter shares a birthday, July 22nd, with another player's daughter One player shared her birthday, Oct. 14th, with another player's mother

meeting in Kuala Lumpa

In the 80's I travelled with my wife to Kuala Lumpur to conduct some training programmes. Imagine our surprise when we saw a neighbour from half a dozen doors up the road walking towards us across the lobby of our hotel! Neither of us knew we were even going there.

Phone all coincidence

My wife and I normally speak once or twice on the phone during work hours, but the other day we hadn't spoken all day. At 16:05 I thought I'd give her a call, but the moment the call connected it went through to voicemail. Half a second later I received a second phone call in my call list. I hung up and answered the call - it was my wife calling to see how I was, explaining why my call to her went through to voicemail. We must have dialled at almost the exact same split second during the eight hours I was at work! I don't believe in 'meaningful matches' as that suggests a third-party pulling the strings, but the coincidence is certainly surprising.

Strange Meetin

When I was a child we visited Cornwall each year for a holiday. When I was about 7 I became friends with one of the guys who worked there. I had a picture taken of me and him and hoped to see him the following year. However he wasn't there. 6 years later we moved to Cornwall and when buying new furniture from a store I spotted a familiar figure. I couldn't be sure it was him though. So the next time we went in the store I took the picture and asked him what he was doing 6 years prior. He thought for a while and I produced the photo. Turns out it was him and he had only recently moved back into Cornwall. Since then the shop has shut down and I've not seen him since... Maybe we'll meet again one day!

Arrested Development Season 4 and my phone

I recently got a new phone. I was customizing it and it had a spot where I can put a little message on my opening screen. I like putting messages in all my stuff, motivational type of things, but this time, I could think if nothing. So, I put "Shhhh" in, no idea why. Then, I started to watch Arrested Development Season 4 on Netflix and I was at the scene where George Sr. was in the sweat lodge and I notice writing on a poster board in the lodge manned by an employee. The writing was "Shhhh!"

Twin Peaks and the Movie

I started finally watching Twin Peaks on Netflix at the same time my mother arrived for a visit these past couple of weeks. My mother watches TCM in TV very often. A day or so ago, I watched an episode where the father of Laura Palmer was singing this weird, old song - it was something I have never heard before, a dancy meaningless-y type of song. An hour ago, I watched another episode in which the same character kind if spooked me and I left my room to put something in the living room. My mom was resting on the couch with TCM on and an old movie was playing with that exact same song being sung at that exact time I stepped into the living room.

travel coincidence

driving from florida to ontario we stopped a a rest area in Tennessee and as i walked in my sister in law who lived in Georgia was walking out. Their family just happened to be returning to ontario for a holiday.

Magic squares connection

I work for a company called The MathWorks. At the SuperComputing 2012 meeting, I explained to Cleve Moler (our chief scientist, and author of the first version of MATLAB) how he could run a magic squares program he was working on using our Parallel Computing capabilities. He wrote a blog entry about this (http://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/2012/11/26/magic-squares-meet-supercomputing/) describing this, and he referenced a paper by Peter Loly. Peter was told about the blog entry, read it, and then contacted me - because he'd been at university with my father (who has the same unusual name as me) in the 1960s.

Family ties

We bought a holiday cottage on the coast 50 miles east of London. The vendor, who was a stranger to us, works in the next office along the corridor from my sister-in-law, in a town 50 miles west of London.

Inexplicable prompting

Some years ago, hurrying to catch a train to visit friends, and without paying attention to what I was doing, I bought the only newspaper left on the stand. It was a broadsheet that I don't normally read as I'm not keen on its politics (never mind which!). As I sat down in the train an apparently random phrase came into my head that I knew I hadn't heard since school history lessons at least 20 years earlier: "The Albigensian Heresy". It seemed an quirky set of words, I thought, as I started to read the the newspaper, for no good reason, at page 5. In the very first news story I started to read was the phrase "The Albigensian Heresy". I can think of no statistical explanation whatever for this and it still freaks me out to think about it!

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