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!

Wrong Number

I was standing in my living room speaking to a contractor that was working in our house. He was the supervisor and he would drop by the house a few times a week to inspect the progress of the work and check in with his workers. His name is Kevin. My mobile phone rings and I answer and the other party asks to speak to Kevin. I hand the phone to Kevin and he proceeds to tell the other party that "no I do not have a cadillac for sale, you must have the wrong number". The probability of such an event is so low that I believe that what I witnessed was a glitch in the Matrix.

Moving away

In October 2010 we moved from Upminster in Essex, and bought a house just south of Cambridge. A few months after moving in, we received a package of plans from the solicitor, which included details of how a large part of the garden had been sold in the 1950s to the school next door. The name and previous address of the house owner was on those details, and he previously lived no more than 2 minutes drive away from our old house in Upminster!

Paint dilemma

I moved into a house in April 1989 and had the walls repainted by a decorator who was recommended to me called Martin Reynard. About twenty years later I moved again to another house in the same city. I wanted to paint my bedroom the same shade as my previous bedroom but could not remember the name of the colour. I went one morning to Brewers to see if their charts could jog my memory and who should be there at that exact moment in time but my painter Martin Reynard. Not only that but he even remembered the make and shade of paint he had used!

Paint dilemma

I moved into a house in April 1989 and had the walls repainted by a decorator who was recommended to me called Martin Reynard. About twenty years later I moved again to another house in the same city. I wanted to paint my bedroom the same shade as my previous bedroom but could not remember the name of the colour. I went one morning to Brewers to see if their charts could jog my memory and who should be there at that exact moment in time but my painter Martin Reynard. Not only that but he even remembered the make and shade of paint he had used!

Meeting old friend

When I was 19 I stayed for six weeks on a kibbutz in Israel where I met and became friends with a swiss man called Rene. This was in the summer of 1977. I returned to England in September 1977 where my boyfriend was and we decided to do some travelling so in April 1978 we went to India. During this time I was not in contact with Rene at all. My boyfriend and I travelled south to Sri Lanka in December 1978 and whilst visiting a hill town called Kandy we were walking down a street and quite literally walked into Rene, I had not had any contact with him since I had left Israel 16 months previously and he knew nothing of any travel plans I may of had.

Book recommendation

I was recently talking to a business colleague in the UK who recommended I read a book about building relationships in business. I had heard of the book but not read it. 4 weeks later I am on a business trip in Korea. I went out for a walk from my hotel to try and get something to read in english. I walked in at randon to a Korean bookshop in Seoul - strolled around looking for something to read - 95% of the books were in Korean. I stumbled upon a table with some english paperbacks and right on top of the pile of books (as if waiting for me) was the very same book in english my friend recommedned that I read a few weeks back. That kind of spooked me ! Coincidence or what ?

Norfolk Broads Miracle

At the time of the Queens silver jubilee in 1977 I was in Horning, Norfolk, 250 miles from home. I was spending a few days on the Broads, on my father's boat with a friend of mine. One day we were driving back to the boat after lunch at the Ferry Inn. As we drove this short distance we came upon 3 girls thumbing a lift. We stopped and gave them a lift. They were on holiday with their parents on a boat, moored near ours. We quickly invited them back to our boat for a few drinks on this lovely warm afternoon. When we exchanged details of where we lived. I found that one of the girls lived only quarter of a mile from me and the other two lived in a small village that I had lived in a few years before. We had never met before but had acquaintances incommon I would love to know what are the chances of meeting someone in this way, so far from home who lives so close. My home town has a population of 90,000. We were 250 miles from home, only away for 3 days. All of us were only at Horning for that one day. There is a lot more to this story – I became engaged to one of the girls.

Emma

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time with the family of the actor Paul Bettany, whose father was our drama teacher at school, but after A levels Paul and I lost touch. One day I bumped into him at Waterloo and we exchanged phone numbers but I lost the bit of paper with the number on. About a year later, I visited a school friend in Norfolk for her first baby's christening, I had never been there before. I arranged to meet up with a couple of other school freinds at a coastal town in Norfolk following the christening, I had never been to the town before. I went to the meeting, but my friends were very late so we didn't meet up. They went for a walk along the beach and bumped into Paul who was coincidently in Norfolk filming. None of these people had been to the town before. My friends explained to him that I had lost his number and took it again. Two days later, back in London, my brother, then manager of a restaurant, was clearing up at the end of the evening when he found on the floor Paul's driving liscence and passport which he had dropped when eating there.

DD Coincidence 3/24

A Guiding hand? I started my training career with The Distillers Company Limited back in 1964. In an effort to overcome a natural reticence and shyness, which, as many friends will attest, are still characteristics of mine, I joined the site amateur dramatic group. One evening we were rehearsing the farce “Here We Come Gathering” in the canteen (now “staff restaurant”). One of my colleagues was playing the part of a psychiatrist and at the point we had reached he had to sit on stage, read a paper and ignore the rest of the cast. We were chatting in the wings when the producer shouted, “Come on, Mike, you’re on!”. Mike grabbed the top newspaper from a pile on the nearest canteen table, went on stage, played his part, came off and said to me, “Hey, Don, there’s a good job here for you!” I looked, I liked, I applied and I got the job which set me off on the start of my life on the Wirral with Unilever. Had Mike Blanckenhagen picked up any other paper than the Manchester Guardian that evening, my life and those of my family would have been very different in the last 40+ years!

DD Coincidence 2/24

A Plummy one One Saturday Margo and I had been shopping in Liverpool and had bought some deliciously ripe plums of which, during the evening's TV viewing, I had eaten three or four. Next morning I was watching Margo potting some plants when I was suddenly aware that the plums were having a deleterious effect on my already fragile digestive system and said, as I left her rapidly, ' I'll have to get rid of my plums.' As I dashed into the kitchen on my way to the bathroom, Radio Merseyside's DJ, Billy Butler, greeted me with the catchphrase of his Sunday morning programme - 'Hold Your Plums!' My riposte was brief, fruity and in the negative!

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