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!

Same Birthday Coincidence

I was born in Chase, Enfield, in 1977. My mum had told me that when I was born there was only one other woman in the delivery suite and she had a baby girl on the same day. I am now in my 30's and about 8 years ago I was on holiday in Tailand and was at a bar one night, I got talking to a girl of a similar age. It turned out we were born on the same day, same year...conincidence! then she said she was born at Chase Farm Hospital, I didn't quite believe it but she told me amongst other things that her dad was a fireman. When I got home I asked mum what the husband of the woman who had given birth did...something I never knew and what do you know, she said a fireman!. Why I didn't get the girls phone number I will never know!

My brother & his ex

My brother's marriage broke up: devastated, he literally fled to the airport after a final fight with his spouse and left the country without contacting anybody. As it turned out, he was abroad for 6 years (he got a divorce within the first 7 months & never contacted his ex again). Finally returning home to Canada after six years, he flew into a distant city in a part of our large country he had never been to before. At the airport, he scoured the newspaper want-ads for a "drive-away" — our term for an individual or company advertising for a person to drive their vehicle to a select destination & bear the cost of gas (a cheap way to cover long distances). My brother found a suitable private drive-away in the ads, phoned the number, made a preliminary agreement with the man on the other end, and went to arrange his ride for the 3500 miles to our family. When he rang the bell at the address, the door opened, and his ex-wife was standing there — apart from strangers, the very last person he had spoken to in Canada before leaving from the other end of the continent 6 years previously, and certainly the last person he had ever expected to speak to again.

waiting for Donald

Once I went to a gathering of musicians in central North Island, New Zealand with my then girlfriend who was a friend of most of those there and was doing the artwork for the compilation they were recording. In the evening I asked one duo where they got their name, "Waiting for Donald", because that was my name. They told me the year before they were on the ferry from the south island to the north island and the over the public address was an announcement trying to contact a passenger called Donald who apparently wasn't responding. This rang a bell in my mind and I asked them the date they travelled and it was the same as the day I had travelled on the ferry. The ferry people were trying to contact me to give me a message. I got into their next gig free, telling the doorman I was Donald and they were waiting for me :)

waiting for Donald

Once I went to a gathering of musicians in central North Island, New Zealand with my then girlfriend who was a friend of most of those there and was doing the artwork for the compilation they were recording. In the evening I asked one duo where they got their name, "Waiting for Donald", because that was my name. They told me the year before they were on the ferry from the south island to the north island and the over the public address was an announcement trying to contact a passenger called Donald who apparently wasn't responding. This rang a bell in my mind and I asked them the date they travelled and it was the same as the day I had travelled on the ferry. The ferry people were trying to contact me to give me a message. I got into their next gig free, telling the doorman I was Donald and they were waiting for me :)

coincidence-dreams

There are people that have many meaningful coincidences in their life and from time to time more or less symbolic precognitive dreams. Reality is much more complex than we imagine. I think many of these people have "thin boundaries" (psychologists know more about this). You can find that such people often get together in societies like International Association for the Study of Dreams http://asdreams.org/subidxconfuture.htm ... here it is a recent article that I found of interest regarding prayer and health ("Rethinking Prayer and Health Research: An Exploratory Inquiry on Prayer’s Psychological Dimension"---http://ssrn.com/abstract=1992323) . It might explain more about what it means to believe something/in something (as this might trigger those coincidences that are meaningful). There is a lot to study and hopefully some researchers will try to bring a little light on these issues. You might want to see the documentary "Placebo: Cracking the Code" (2002).

Shared Bed

Two year after leaving Australia to live in the UK I was boarding in a very old house in Devon. Talking on the phone one day, i noticed a photo on the wall of a big guy, i thought i knew, holding a snake and i asked the landlady who it was. She said it was her son and it was his bed i had upstairs. the guy was a friend i worked alongside in sydney for 2 years, 5 years earlier.

The Lost Diamond

Several years ago, when I was nine, our family was standing and singing in church. My mother was holding my dad's hand, and she happened to look down and notice that the diamond had fallen out of her engagement ring. She began to panic and she searched her bag, the area around her, and even retraced the steps she had taken that day- but alas, the diamond was not to be spotted. She was rather distraught on the way home, and when we arrived she searched the path to the door. I went ahead inside, and as I crossed the threshold, I looked down and there in the doorframe was a little glimmering speck. I picked it up and it was the diamond! Of all the places the diamond could have been lost, it had landed just inside the house and I had immediately seen it right when we got home.

Kepler's marriage problem

Recently, I remembered about a history book that I had read around 10 years ago. In the book there was this story about a scientist who had a strange way to chose a bride, but I couldn't remember any more details. Yesterday, I borrowed a book at random from the university library on the subject of optimization. In page 4 of the book there was a paragraph referring to the very same story, now dealt with as a mathematical optimization problem named the secretary problem. The scientist is nobody but the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler.

Work colleagues

Many years ago I worked in a retail store in the south of England. 5 years later I was travelling around the United States and ended up on Fishermans wharf in San Francisco. As I walked along, coming towards me was someone that I worked with 5 years earlier - we laughted at the coincedence and parted. Later that year I attended a conference in the north of England and was sitting next to a woman and we got to talk about small worlds - I proceeded to tell the woman about how I was walking along Fishermans' Wharf in SF. Before I could finish my story - The woman gave me the name of the person I had met it was her brother - Now that's a small world.

Getting a fax in Egypt

Slowly touring down the Nile River Valley without a schedule, my stock of local currency needed replenishment. At one point in a very small town I noticed a shop with a currency exchange sign posted outside, and I went in. As I approached the proprietor I was dumbfounded when he addressed me by name and handed me a fax from Boston, USA as follows: "Are you Mr. M---? I have a fax for you!" And indeed, I was looking at a personally addressed fax to me regarding a relatively minor issue I had raised with a vendor by telephone the previous week! I had not requested or expected a fax reply, and I could not have told you which town I would have been in on any given day if you had asked me. Picking this particular little store on that day in that town was a spontaneous whim based on my local currency needs. To this day I have no idea how this happened, short of the sender having sent this fax to every little fax machine in the entire Nile Valley together (which may have been the case although it seems a bit much given that the subject was a missing straw hat). But was every store owner asking every American if they were me up and down the Valley?

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