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!

3 birthday cards the same sent by 3 sisters

On my husband's 80th birthday, my two sisters and myself all bought him the same birthday card. We all live at least 30 miles away from each other.

shopping coincidence

On a coach trip to the Lake District, a couple of years ago, we stopped at a large shopping outlet where I bought 2 bedside lamps in the colour and size I'd been looking for. On returning to the coach I placed the package on a back seat where other people had put their shopping and didn't look at them again until I arrived home. To my amazement the lamps were a different colour to the ones I'd bought but otherwise identical. I telephoned the outlet, was put through to the lighting shop and was told that 4 lamps of this design had been sold on the day in question but as there were a lot of coach parties there that day I thought I'd never find out who the other customer was. As a last resort I rang the coach company and asked if anyone had been in touch regarding having the wrong purchase; no one had, but they gave me a contact number for the coach driver and his wife (who was also the Courier for the trip) and when I spoke to her she said SHE had bought 2 lamps but hadn't yet unpacked them. It turned out that, indeed, I had her lamps and she mine - identical except for colour! I still think it an incredible coincidence!

Tenerife

In November on returning from a week in Tenerife I had an operation on my knee. Prior to the op I had all the usual checks by a nurse who commented on my tan and asked where I had been. I told her and she replied that she had also been to Tenerife in May. She asked me what part of the island and I replied Playas de las Americas, she had also stayed there. Which hotel? "The Meditteranean Palace" I replied, so had she. "Did you have a sea view?" she asked "No" I said "a room to the side from which you could see the sea and the mountains" So did she. "We had a top floor room with a large balcony with it's own plunge pool" she said. "So did we" "Room 9408?" "Oh My Goodness" she said"We have slept in the same bed!!" "And comfortable it was too!" I said!

Wallingford Town Hall

About six or seven years ago my wife and I were spending a weekend in Bournemouth in late autumn. On the Saturday morning we decided to visit and explore nearby Wimbourne. After visiting the minster we went into the nearby small museum. There was a garden at the rear of the museum in which there was a tearoom. After looking around the museum we went to the tearoom. Being outside the summer season there were very few visitors and there was no one else in the tearoom other than my wife and I and a lady museum volunteer who was serving. We sat and chatted to her as we had our refreshments. She told us she was interested in history and worked as a volunteer at the museum for just a few hours a week. She asked where we came from and we told her we lived in Wallingford. She said "That's a coincidence , I used to live in Wallingford when I was a youngster". I asked her where and said "At the Cross Keys public house which my parents ran". The first coincidence - this was next door to where we lived. When she and her parents lived at the Cross Keys it was probably over ten years before I moved to Wallingford.

Coincidental phone call and odds

We used to phone some friends about once every 1 to 3 years. We sat down one evening and decided it was time to ring them. We did so and they were engaged. Sure enough, when we rang a second time and chatted we discovered they had tried to ring us and we were engaged! This was in the time preceding digital exchanges. We have no idea how long (in seconds) that this sort of simultaneous dialling would cause an engaged tone, but let's assume 1 second. We usually rang them after a year, but before, say, three years. So that was about a one second chance in two years. Assuming we would ring some time during the evening, then that is one second in 2 years x 365 days x 3 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds which is a chance of 1 in 7884000 !! Much better than winning the lottery :-) Spookily, I turned the TV on one Sunday evening (several years after the above) and channel hopped. As I switched to the BBC I heard the name of the same person with whom we had the coincidence above. It turned out he was representing the Navy at the annual Festival of Remembrance Service at the Royal Albert Hall. I cannot calculate the odds of that - there are quite a few factors to consider.

Two dead British Artist purchase goods from my shop

I work in an electrical retailer in St Albans, Hertfordshire. When a customer had selected the item they would like to purchase, the sales assistant (me) is required to take some personal details the put them on our data base and therefore process the order. I was first confronted with a gentleman by the name of Mr. Hogarth, who share his surname with 18th century artist, William Hogarth. Several minutes later I processed another order for a gentleman who went by the name of Mr. Constable, obviously sharing the name with John Constable another 18th/19th century dead British Artist. I could not believe my luck.

friends

I work in a school. My line manaager and I were at a meeting in another school. I mentioned that my grammar school was a very similar building. She said her mother went to a grammar school in Bristol with the same building type. .We discovered that her mother was my middle sister's best friend through grammar school. My family had always lived in Bristol her family had moved away to Newport and then back to Bath.

Cosmic twins - twice?

After my daughter was born at The Rosie Maternity Hospital, Cambridge on the evening of 9 July 1985 I got chatting the following morning to a lady in the next bed whose son was born on the same day. Nearly two years later, on 17 June 1987, I was back in the same hospital where my son was born. The following morning I became convinced that I had seen the lady in the next bed before. I put this to her and she said she had thought the same thing about me. It turned out that this was the same lady and on the same day my son was born she had given birth to her daughter. What are the chances, I'd like to know...................... By the way, my son was also born on my father's birthday!

Small World

I live in the small village of Souldern in Oxfordshire, there are only about 100 houses here. Last November I was visiting my daughter who lives in the town of Alexandra in New Zealand. Whilst there I got chatting to a work colleague of hers and told him I was on holiday from the UK upon which he said he was coming to visit the UK himself for the first time in his life in May of this year. As we chatted more about his forthcoming trip and what he wanted to see here he added that he would be visiting a cousin of his who lives here; when I asked where his cousin lived he told me it was a place called Souldern in Oxfordshire. I know his cousin, her house is a 10 minute walk from mine.

"Nancy Drew" coincidence

At work, four years ago, I was looking up an article on Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew series, on Wikipedia. A coworker, who had already been there for a few hours (in other words, he could not have possibly known what I was reading) mentioned the Nancy Drew series to another coworker.

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