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!

birthday coincidence

My best friend sheri has the same birthday as me 3/30 my name is Lucy My younger brother ezell has the same birthday as his best friend Luis 2/21 My husband has a very good friend whom he has been requested to be a best man for. They chose the the same wedding date as our anniversary 4/28.

old contact

Recently in the mail room I noticed for the first time that someone at my work place had the same first name as me (a very uncommon name in the UK but a bit more common in french and spanish speaking regions- but nonetheless have never met anyone else with my name) and this person had the same last name (also uncommon) of a classmate of mine from 15+ years ago, which I still remembered although I had never had any contact with her after leaving that school. The coincidence is that that very evening, I had a facebook friend request from this old classmate.

Scrabble

My son placed a word "naw" on the scrabble board, I pointed out that it should be "gnaw", we checked the dictionary and THEN we discussed using an Apple app that could suggest correct words from his rack. We went to the App store and the first screenshot of the Lexeme app had the word GNAW listed. Freaky. 10 minutes apart.

'same house'

I grew up in Barnsley - a town in South Yorkshire UK and moved to New York eight years ago. I work as a contract attorney on a case by case basis. I started a new project last week with a group of attorneys I didn't know. Yesterday in conversation I found out the guy two seats away from me holds a UK passport. As the conversation transpires I find out he grew up in my home town. I'm struck by the coincidence. I ask him where he lived and he names the street where I lived until I was five. Then the number of the house - it's the same house where I lived until I was five. His family still own the house. We spent the first few years of our lives (he is 6 years younger than me) in the same house, went to the same nursery school, same primary school and both live in New York, both became attorneys and somehow out of many contract attorney projects found ourselves sitting two seats apart thousands of miles from our home town and house, working on the same case. There is also a bizarre name link. I've experienced many coincidences but this is probably the strangest yet.

Simultaneous email events

A friend and I email each other at the same time 17:19 and for no reason. We had communicated 3 times in the morning but stopped about midday. Then, our email late afternoon emails crossed paths at the same time.

The circle of life

My daughter is living in Sydney with her husband, baby son and small stepson. They have just moved to a new development and my daughter was feeling a bit lonely. Being an older mother, she is 45, she decided that she needed a 'mummy friend' who would mirror her - she couldn't really face chumming up with a girl in her twenties. She went to a roaming playgroup, the large van turns up at a location and installs all the playthings just for the day and then moves on. After a short time she noticed a potential candidate - a mature woman with a baby and small boy and she walked over to speak to her. As she did, the woman gathered her children up and made to leave. My daughter and the woman smiled as they passed but didn't talk. My daughter was a little upset that she had missed her chance. Ten minutes later the woman and her children returned to the playgroup and approached my daughter.

Co Pilot

I used to work for a small Midwestern airport which ran United Express to ORD. It was a small airport and we usually got the same crew of the pilot and co pilot for a week at a time. 15 years later, I am living in the Southwest and haven't worked for the airlines since that one job. I was flying back to Illinois 2 years ago for Christmas on American and when the crew said their names I happened to recognize one of them. I thought it was too random but was curious. When the plane landed in DFW and I had to change planes, I walked out and it was the same co pilot that I used to work with 15 years before! I asked if she remembered me and she did! We talked briefly - was very strange for both of us obviously since I hadn't thought of her since I left that job since we were never particularly friends. What was strange was it was a completely different airline from the one we both worked for and her route was nowhere near the Midwest. The plane ride was only a connector flight and it was about the same distance/time as the one we both used to work! I have had lots of things like this happen and feel very fortunate when they do.

Curious double meeting

Last weekend I was in Berlin and a great coincidence happened. On Friday afternoon I took the tube from a relatively central station to one of the main ones (Alexanderplatz). I sat right in front of a girl of my age and left the tube without talking to her or anything. She stayed in the tube. Then, after dinner, at around midnight, I went to Alexanderplatz station again... and I almost crashed into her! We both realised this, smiled, said hi and went to our respective (different) platforms. This is a famous station, so it makes it more likely, but for this reason it is also a big station with several corridors, which I think makes it less likely. On Sunday afternoon I went to see some rests of the wall with a friend (one of the two most famous spots) and went into the museum about the holocaust next to it. And guess what happened...at some point we were reading the same poster next to each other! We then had to start talking and apparently this was the only touristy stuff she did in her trip (she was there for the weekend only) and went into the museum only because it was cold outside.

Same words at exact same time

I posted a similar coincidence some months ago (pate as answer to crossword clue at exact same time that it was uttered in a Frasier repeat on TV), but I think this one is better! I regularly hear common words on TV as I read them, which is not that unusual, but what are the chances of the following... Mothers Day 10 March 2013 and, having been given the full treatment (heart shaped toast, Earl Grey tea, flowers etc), my daughters (21 and 20) started to play with a newly purchased Atari Flashback 3 Classic Games Console, i.e games from well before they were born, while I was left in peace to read my Sunday paper. The Atari games are quite 'clunky' and unresponsive to those used to more sophisticated computer games and daughter no 1 was getting frustrated when playing 'Save Mary' that operating the controls were not saving said Mary, so she yelled out 'down, down, down, down, down'. At exactly that time (in precise time with my daughter's words) I was reading an article about Nicole Scherzinger (page 17 of the Independent on Sunday) about a duet with 50 Cent containing the words 'down, down, down, down, down'.

My unbelievable but true story...

At the age of 27, pregnant with my first son, my father whom I loved dearly died suddenly of a cardiovascular incident, just one month before my son's birth... </p> <p>The events in my life followed a normal course over the next year : I got pregnant with my second son and my husband and I decided to buy our first house. We wanted to live outside the city, surrounded by nature with more land than the usual suburb. We lived in the Montreal region and didn't have enough money to acquire the kind of property we dreamed about in that region, unless we went more than an hour drive from the city (plus huge trafic). Since we worked mainly near the city, this was highly problematic, so we decided to look towards an area near Quebec city (250 km away), where my best friend had moved a couple years before, following her new boyfriend. The area had most of the qualities we were looking for and was only twenty minutes from Quebec city. Also, my family (Grand-mother aunts, uncles and cousins) to whom I wasn't very close (reason is I had never lived near them) all lived in Quebec city.

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