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!

Constellations on Gemini Twin faces

My brothers are identical twins called Ross and Kevin. Throughout their lives they have used the moles on their faces to help people identify which is which. Ross had Orion's belt on his right cheek and Kevin had the Bear/Plough on his left cheek. One evening Kevin was researching our surname, McMahon, and discovered that the name came from the Mahon tribe in Ireland, the leader of which was named after the Big Bear in the sky. Further research led to the discovery that our mother's family name, Pengilly, came from a connection to Orion, the Headhunter. This definitely piqued our interest so I overlaid these constellations on pictures of Ross and Kevin's faces and we were stunned by the accuracy of the placement of the moles and the primary stars in each constellation. Even further than this, we realised that there were a few other major stars in the constellations that we discovered actually existed on their faces as well! The fact that they are Geminis as well as being identical twins also adds interest.

Meeting someone from the same area, many miles away

My son Ross was travelling in Australia in either the Autumn of 2001 or 2002. In one town he was in a bar with his girlfriend, they started chatting with an Australian couple. But in fact they had emigrated many years earlier from England. Ross asked where "North London" they replied. Pressed for more information they replied "Enfield" This is where my family and my children were born and I still live just up the road in Edmonton. Ross then asked whereabouts in Enfield and they told him Carterhatch Road, this was the the next turning up from my childhood home! What a coincidence. I had a similar experience in 1980. I was on holiday in Newquay with my husband. One day we hired a tandem and went cycling. We stopped for lunch on a beach along the coastline. A short time later a young couple strolled past. She was the Saturday girl from the shoeshop that I worked in. I knew she was also holidaying in Cornwall, but what were the odds?

The Same Room

When I was an undergraduate at University one of my good friends was in a band, so I went down to one of their gigs and watched them play. Also at the bar was a girl (from Wellington) who I had studied with in first year, so I went over and chatted to her, after the gig finished my friend came over and I introduced him to her. My friend had grown up in Wellington, before moving to Dunedin so asked whereabouts this girl lived, and turned out that not only was the girl now living in the same suburb, and the same street, but also the same house and room that my friend had occupied when growing up.

Witness of death

My wife comes from the north-west of Spain, and we often spend holidays on the Mediterranean coast at Torrevieja, where we have made a number of friends from different parts of Spain who also holiday there. A married couple, our very good friends, went on holiday for this past New Year to The Canary Islands. We were astounded when Sarah phoned us to say that on the second night that they were having dinner in their hotel Andres started choking, and despite the best efforts of the hotel staff & paramedics, they were unable to save him. A couple of weeks later my wife received a phone call from her sister in La Coruña who told about her recent visit to the Canary Islands. She said that when there, while having evening dinner, a man at a nearby table had collapsed. There had been a lot of people milling around the collapsed person and when she asked the staff she was told that the man had died. Upon asking about the date of the incident and the name of the hotel these turned out to be identical to those that Sarah had given us.

Chance Meeting in New York

My old school classmates and I all turned 50 during 2010/11. My birthday is in January, and my husband and I decided, as part of the birthday celebrations, to holiday later in the year (September/October) - staying in New York for 4 nights, followed by a tour of New England. On our 2nd day in New York we spotted that the Queen Mary was docked, and commented that the last time we'd seen her was when she sailed up the River Mersey, past our house, a few weeks earlier. On our last day in New York we decided to use the final one of our 4 day bus tickets, so left our hotel and walked across town to Times Square to get the tourist bus to to do the "Central Park Loop". There are at least two companies who have buses leaving Times Square every 20 minutes or so throughout the day. You can imagine our shock when we climbed to the top deck of the bus and and found an old schoolfriend of mine and her husband, who were celebrating her 50th birthday having travelled over on the Queen Mary and were spending 3 nights in New York (her birthday had been previous September but her husband had left it too late to book a trip for that autumn!).

Red faces for big mouths

I live in a country in Asia, and one night I was out with a few guys with whom I spent time in a UK uni the year before. We were reminiscing about our past and all the good Uni times, and somehow I came up with the topic about a hot girl (who was of similar nationality to us) who was a friend of our friend back during Uni days, who used to come over to our city (back when we were in the UK) a couple of times for gatherings and stuff. We guys were pondering and admiring about, let's just say, 'the physical perfection' of this particular girl and we were conversing quite out loud if I may recall, perhaps adding in some inappropriate comments at times...just us guys being guys. It was perhaps past 2 a.m. in a small cafe located in a slightly remote rural village which only had maybe three tables filled up with customers. Whilst we were still on the subject of this, erm...hot girl....a group of customers suddenly left their table which was barely a few metres behind ours approaching the only exit which was near to us, and who did I see?

Found cousin

From a message board, I found another woman searching for the same family name and was contacted by her to see if we were connected. We couldn't find a connection, but kept in touch and she, being even more avid a researcher than I, found another family (name) member and put her in touch with me. This woman is my third cousin, same great grandfather, our immigrant family member and my third cousin now lives in the homestead where my father was born and moved away from when he was four. We are now in touch and have exchanged information for many years. She is the one I mentioned who contacted another third cousin she heard about and he sent me the information I was searching for in Germany, while I was gone. In addition to that, the woman who put us in touch with each other suggested I have my father do a DNA test, since I'm the end of the line in that family and a girl. He did, and we found that, we are related to her family with a common ancestor, for whom we are now both searching.

Another genealogical coincidence

I had been working for many years on all lines of my family. I was at a dead end with one of them, even on message boards, nothing was showing up after 10 years of my posting. I stop looking, then a few years later, decided to try again. There was no answer to my posting but other people were asking questions about others and a few sounded like they might have been in the same area (with the same last name) and one woman was answering those questions but the postings were cold (a few years old). I decided to try to contact her anyway and it turns out she's an expert on that family, has been studying it for years, contacted my great aunt for information back in the 1960's, and since then has found the family history back to the 1600's. She is a descendant of the brother of my immigrant ancestor who came over in the 1740's. The next part of it was...I told my aunt (now divorced from my father's brother and remarried for several years) about the progress I had made with that family line. She told her husband and he reminded her that he had met that woman on a plane about ten years before that.

Man who knew my grandfather

At the grocery store one day in my relatively new home in a small town in Florida, there was a new "bag boy", an elderly man and he helped me out to the car with my groceries. I asked him where he was from because his accent was not a local one, and he said Pennsylvania. I said, "I was born in PA...what town are you from?" He said it was a small town I would not likely have heard of...turned out I had and I told him my home town where I lived until I was 7. He asked my maiden name, I told him and he said "was your grandfather a policeman?" I said "yes" and he said "he was my uncle's best friend". I said "who was your uncle?" and it turned out that he was one of the very few people I still remembered from that long time ago, almost 60 years.

genealogy coincidence

I had been working on this one family line for ten years and hit a wall. We went to Germany searching for information. Found church records office closed for two weeks (manager out of town on vacation). Records at town hall didn't go back before 1850...they were in Stuttgart and we needed an appointment and couldn't get it due to local holidays. Left with nothing new on our search except photos and a few contacts in Germany with the same last name and no link found. Returned home and, on my computer while I was gone, I had received an e-mail from an unknown third cousin (through a known third cousin's request to him), giving me information his brother had gotten in Germany when he was stationed there, and got back two more generations with that one e-mail...sitting on my computer while I was over in Germany looking to no avail.

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