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!

Fifty mile walk coincidence

Fifty mile walk coincidence In my late teens President Kennedy suggested that a fit person would be able to walk fifty miles. The local paper - the Kent Messenger - took up his words and organised a challenge for its readers; - to start at midnight from Dreamland, Margate and walk through the night and the next day to the destination fifty miles away in Maidstone. A few friends thought this sounded a good way to spend a weekend. So: on a social trip to Maidstone I visited the bus station to work out the way to get to Margate at the right time. A friendly young conductress was happy to give the information and wished us well. The evening of the walk came and we took the double-decker bus for Maidstone . . . and the same blonde conductress was selling the tickets; this seemed like a good omen. The walk started, we walked through the night, past Canterbury, dawn came on, we sang to our portable transistor radios and plodded on. Getting pretty tired and footsore, by afternoon we were near Lenham, ten miles or so from the finish, when a single-decker Maidstone and District bus pulled out of a side road, turning on to our road . . .

Car Registration Numbers

Many years ago (early 80s?) I was driving round the North Circular early in the morning, when it was still dark but beginning to get light. I was driving my car, whose Reg. No. was VGY 688G. My attention was drawn to the number of the car in front. To my amazement its Reg. No. appeared also to be VGY 688G. Naturally I stayed behind the car as long as I could. Eventually it was light enough to see more clearly. Its number was actually YGY 688G. However the tail of the first character, Y, was so short that in the half-light it looked like a V.

Family left handed

I am left left handed, my husband is left handed, both my children are left handed.

I can beat every meeting coincidence....

In 1974 I took up a Fellowship at Ann Arbor, Mich, USA. Apart from my colleagues at AA, I knew only one other American well: Rick Schaffer, whose Ph.D I'd co-supervised in the UK. He'd returned to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On Thanksgiving weekend, I traveled to Chicago to visit relatives. They took us out to a 'theatre-diner', where you get supper and then see a show. There, of course was Rick with his family. Co-incidence enough perhaps, except that after supper we all trooped into the theatre and Rick and I produced adjacent tickets: T14 and T15............. I know a bit about probability, I'm Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at PSI/Westminster, but I still recall those tickets with superstitious awe. Best wishes Alan Marsh

New Zealand to Canada

About 8 years ago we took a holiday with Journey’s of Distinction in New Zealand. The party was from all over Britain. We flew out to Singapore and then spent 3 weeks on a coach tour of both North and South NZ. There were some couples we got on with quite well and in particular a couple from the London area. We then came home never expecting to see any of the tour again. A few years later my wife and I took a holiday in Canada, starting in Toronto then going across Canada to the Inside Passage. My wife was window shopping in Toronto, as she does, and I started to take pictures of the mall. I turned round with my camera to find the screen filled with the couple from London!

A Question of Timing 2

I went for a holiday to North Wales, somewhere I'd never been before and haven't since. We checked into our bed and breakfast and then decided to go for a walk. As we came out of the door, a car went past with my brother in it. Neither of us had any idea the other was in that part of the world. A few seconds either way and we might not have seen each other. As we don't meet that often, we may never have found out that we were both in the same place at the same time, if it hadn't been for that timing. It makes you wonder how many "near misses" you have without ever knowing it.

A Question of Timing 1

I spent my honeymoon in Venice. In the hotel we were staying in, my wife and I saw a couple with a very young baby and we commented to each other on how difficult it must be taking a newborn on a holiday like that. That weekend, the day after we got back from the holiday, we were invited to dinner by friends. They told us another couple were coming but were held up because they had a new baby. They also said this couple had just been to Venice too. When they arrived we had the obvious conversation. "Oh, we've just been to Venice as well. Where were you staying?" Same area. "Which hotel?" Same hotel. Light bulb moment. It was the couple we had seen. Had we been invited to dinner with the same people say a month later, the conversation might have been "Oh, we were in Venice at around that time. What a coincidence" but the connection might not have been made.

Malta coincidences

I have three related coincidences relating to my 4 years in Malta: 1) Some 15-20 years ago my local tennis club were a bit desperate for players for the first team match on a Sunday at Brabyn's near Stockport. At that stage I was not playing much, but they roped me in. We played their 3rd couple and had a good match, but lost. We then played their first couple - they were much too good for us. However, at one stage when we were crossing at the net I thought I recognised the walk of one of the opponents (he was slightly pigeon toed). Next time we crossed I asked him his name - he said 'Jeff Williams'. Jeff was now 6'5'' and wearing a big beard, but he and I used to live about 20 yards from each other in Malta. We went to the same school (Tal Handaq), trained in the gym together, ran together, played table tennis, squash, football - you name it! When we could we would practice tennis 6-8 hours in a day. Jeff went on to be a professional coach, getting a scholarship in the USA, coaching in Mauritius and Japan (coached their #1 woman). Eventually he settled near Stockport because he had married a Manchester girl.

Unlikely Meeting

In 1971 I went on holiday with a group to Switzerland. We had the afternoon in Berne before catching our train home. A small group of us went into a baker's shop in a back street to buy some food for the journey home. We asked if they served tea since there were one or two tables and received an affirmative response. Shortly afterwards another group came in. We made room for them and a couple sat at my table. To my amazement they lived in the next road with the gardens backing on just a few houses down. There was no common reason for us both to be there and it could have been anyone in the world who might visit Switzerland. It was not like passing someone in the street, they were actually sitting opposite me at the table! Having had numerous other extremely low probability coincidences and heard of many more I asked a professor of mathematics about this. The only explanation I could get was that there were all the other things that did not happen. There are of course all the things that did happen but you did not know about.

Duplicate Photograph

My mother gave me a large limited edition (1 of 150) photograph. The photograph is of a papier mache construction of a string quartet, created by a German artist. the original artwaork is a sort of flattish 3D creation, very impressive. The print hangs on my wall near manchester, UK. When I married in the Far East, we visited some of my wife's relatives in Manila, Philippines. On the wall was another of those 15 prints.

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