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!

25 years

In 1987, I dated Carl Herbert Bolar Jr. and discovered that he was born on the same day as me (Sept. 21, 1957). He has a twin brother while I have an older brother Bam who was born on Sept. 21, 1953. 25 years later, I searched for Bert and found a posting on the internet that his father died on November 10, 2006. My father was born on November 10, 1923 and died on November 10, 2010. There may be other similarities which are not confirmed. I married my husband in 1989 when he was 42 years old. Bert married his wife in 2009 and she may have been 42 years old. Cynthia

Statistical Prize draw oddity

I bought a quantity of Irish Prize Bonds, and in the first year I had 29 small wins. This is better than two every month, or better than 50-50 odds in the weekly draw! One week I had 5 wins ! what are the chances ? I doubled my holding, but in the second year I won less than the first !

The Green Flash

Recently while admiring a sunset in the West of Ireland with a friend, I expressed a wish to photograph the 'green flash'. As he had never heard of this atmospheric phenomenon, I explained it to him. A few hours later I was having dinner with a different group of friends when one told me that he had just returned from an Arctic Cruise. "We even saw the green flash' he told me !

Genealogy 101

Sometime in the 1990s, I had never done any genealogy research on my family. One day I was in my local library in Florida, which had a modest genealogy section. I began to browse the genealogy stacks at random with the intent of becoming familiar with the available genealogy resources. About the second document I picked up was an unbound collection of photocopied pages stapled together entitled A Compilation of the Descendants of [omitted] and [redacted]. I had never heard of any family connection to those surnames. However, I opened it up at random, and saw my mother's name! She was one of those descendants. So, in my first five minutes as a genealogist, seven generations of my ancestry were revealed. This was not a local hometown document. It was from Georgia and mostly about Georgia and I was in Florida. I proceeded to photocopy the pages so I would have it at home. On getting home with the copy, I saw a faint image of an address label on the title page. It was the name and address of my great Aunt in Atlanta! She was dead at that point, so I was not able to ask her how this came to be. Apparently, she had possession of a previous copy of this document at one time.

Special Delivery Document

Attending University of Florida in 1976 or 1977, I began research on my senior project in Computer Science. Since this was in the pre-Internet era, I used the library. I went into the Engineering Library and consulted "Computer and Control Abstracts", a huge index of published literature in the computing field. From there, I identified four articles that might be helpful in my project of choice. I was able to find three of them in the vast holdings of the Engineering Library, but they didn't really pan out. The fourth sounded much more promising, but I couldn't find it. It was in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 4, number 6, published by the North Holland Publishing Company. I had never heard of the journal or the publisher before. I was very impressed by the huge number of periodicals available in the long, tall stacks of the engineering library, but they did not include that one. I consulted the reference librarian who confirmed that the UF engineering library didn't subscribe to that journal.

Coincidence involving a koala

On holiday in Australia for two weeks visiting daughter and son in law. We planned to do some travelling by car visiting the Blue Mountains and the Hunter Valley and I enquired what the chances of seeing a Koala bear in the wild would be. I was told that its extremely rare to see a Koala in the wild. Driving along I thought about whether I might be able to fool my daughter by taking a photo of a toy Koala sat on a few twigs. No sooner did I have this wicked thought than a loud voice shrieked at me to stop the car as there was a "wombat" crossing the road. It turned out to be the real deal a lovely furry Koala bear who got to the other side of the road shimmed up a tree and turned towards us for a photo shoot. What's the chance of that happening?

Siblings with same birthdays

My older brother was born on February 8, 1970. our younger brother was born February 8, 1978. Our younger sister was born February 8, 1980.

mystery object

Last year I was watching the German TV programme 'Dings vom Dach', in which viewers send in strange objects (tools or devices with a particular use) and a panel has to guess what it is used for. These objects are extremely wide-ranging, as they can be used to do anything in the world, and are strange either because they relate to some esoteric pursuit or because they are historical. Objects from that episode included a pipe holder and a tool used for bending branches of a particular tree in a particular direction so that it would grow that way. (Many of the tools on the show relate to past ways of German life and industry or agriculture.) They can really be anything, as long as it is an object designed for a particular use. Towards the end of the programme, I said that if I were in Germany, I would send in an oboe reed shaper, which is a piece of equipment used to hold some prepared cane in shape over a metal tongue of particular dimensions so that you can cut the cane to the shape of the tongue using a knife.

Surprise meeting

In 1977 I bought a new house in Hamilton, Scotland and flew off on business to the Middle East before I had met any of my new neighbours. On the return journey, I boarded a busy Qantas 747 in Manama, Bahrain. This plane was refueling on a flight from Sydney to London. I sat next to a chap who had boarded in Sydney and was also bound for London. We each recognised the other as Scots and struck up a conversation ......... and quite stunningly discovered that we were next door neighbours in Hamilton.

Uncle in Oz meeting a man from his past

My uncle grew up in a small village in Somerset. He heard a Somerset accent of a man 40ish years later in a pub in Queensland and went over to say hello. He named the village and the man said he used to take a Flight Wing Commander and his name, from the train station to the village when he was a taxi driver 35 ish years before. He remembered lots of children running out to greet them. My uncle was one of them!

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