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!

Oblique strategies card

I've been curious about Brian Eno's oblique strategies for some time, and one day I decided to visit a website that randomly shows one of the cards. The card that showed up was "cluster analysis", which was the topic of my Master's thesis, which I was finishing at the time.

Birthdays

My partner and his brother are unidentical twin brothers. The wife of my partner's twin brother and I, female, have the same birth day, too. Our shared birthdays are 14 days apart.

A man in Connecticut

In 2014 my school in Melbourne Australia was holding an art exhibition. The curator of the exhibition was American, partner of a former student of the school. We were chatting about where he came from in the US. I mention I had a friend who was Head of a school in New Hampshire. When I mention the school, he said they used to play sport against the school. I asked him which school he attended. It was Deerfield in Massachusetts. I said the only person who i knew who worked there was a person called David Dun***. It turned out this fellow had David as a teacher. I met David in 2005 at an education conference in Washington. I noticed his family named matched a person I had met in a school in New Hampshire in 1987. It turned out that this person was his father. The coincidence continues. A close colleague was visiting a sister school in Connecticut in 2017. She was given a person to look after her for the day. This fellow had worked in Melbourne in the 1980s, for a year. When she was introduced, the fellow wondered if she new her brother David's acquaintance in Melbourne - which turned out to be me. These experiences happen to me all the time, but this is the most extreme.

Reconnected 30 years later

In the 1980's, my 1st husband & I were working and living in a caravan park in a Perth suburb of Western Australia. At the time I had a 2 yr old girl. One day I was in the Laundry of the van park when a young man apparently was there to do his laundry as well. This man asked me how to work the washing machine, which I apparently showed him, we spoke very briefly,(no flirting, I was happily married then)! In 2005 I divorced my husband (Tony). Fast forward to 2007,I am back living in NSW on the other side of the country again. I met a man on a dating site named (David), became just conversational friends and didn't physically meet for another 6 months when I moved to Brisbane for a job from NSW. After dating for 2 years, I moved in with David and during one evening when I was showing him my old photo albums before I packed them away into a cupboard, I came across a photo of me taken during the 1980's while I lived in Perth. I hadn't told David about my time in the Caravan Park, we were just randomly talking about the 80's era of our lives.

Dreams on the same day

I've been keeping a dream diary for several years. There is a very specific (sexual) subject that I occasionally dream about, and I noticed that two instances of it occurred in September 12th 2015 and September 12th, 2016, so exactly a year apart! I record the date of the dream on the day I wake up, so the dream took place in the night between September 11th and September 12th. And no, it has nothing to do with September 11th 2001, completely different subject-matter. For full honesty, though, the next instance occurred in October 21st, 2017, however, so not as impressive. And it seems I haven't dreamt about the subject in almost 3 years.

Darth Vader

My kid was playing with his Darth Vader towel yesterday - I jokingly asked if he wanted a ‘Darth Vader Impersonator’ for his birthday party. I thought I was so clever I tweeted it. Later that day a neighbor kid was wearing a ‘Darth Gator’ T-shirt from the zoo. Sure - little kids love Darth Vader - but the other kids shirt was a gator doing an impersonation of Darth Vader These happen 2-5 times a day to me.

My Adopted Father's Story

My dad was born in the United States and adopted as an infant by an American couple. When he was in grade school, his family moved to Germany for his father's work in the foreign service. He lived there through high school, becoming fluent in German, and adopting many aspects of German culture as his own. His adoptive parents were not German. As an adult, he found out who his birth family was, and it turns out that his birth mother was a German immigrant. Also, his mother had an identical twin sister who also had a son, and he had the same name as my father!

Sisters intertwined

I went to Australia and met two people who work on different projects at a big American company, but spend time working with other stuff they're passionate about. Two years later, one sister who went to my uni in the US reached out to me because one of my professors told her I might be able to help her on a project that combines two disciplines not many in my field are familiar with. We have dinner together and she has her husband and daughter join. she wants me to join a project with one of the people I met in Australia. And we chat, I mention I'm going to Mexico City in a couple weeks. Her daughter mentions she has a cousin there who might be able to show me around, so I hit her up. About a year later, the other sister (sister to the aforemented sister) emails me about a very different different project because the same professor told her I might be able to help (sister 2 also did her PhD at my university a long time ago). She says she's working with the OTHER person from Australia on a project. Turns out neither sister knew the other had contacted me, and I didn't connect the dots that the person I met in Mexico City was the second sister's daughter.

Family resemblance

Cousin 1, through one of my mum's sisters, was raised in England. Cousin 2, through another of my mum's sisters, was raised in France. (Both are cousins of each other.) When Cousin 1 was on her gap year in New Zealand, she got chatting to some random French girls. Then one said, "You look a lot like our friend [Cousin 2's name]!"

Pages