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!

Names!!!

Some 50 years ago whilst at junior school the surname Taylor was quite commonplace and whilst I had a friend in my class with the same surname which was not unusual [I believe there were four lads in the same class with surname] what transpired about 30 years later was a coincidence. After leaving junior school I was totally unaware of what happened to my friend until I came across him in a local store. We exchanged greetings as you do and discovered that we had both married, both had two daughters and both had named them Joanna and Diana. What are the chances?

Grandson's middle names

We have two grandsons, Oliver Louis (3) and Daniel Arthur (nearly 2) with our two daughters and husbands. The coincidence is that both chose those middle names not realising that Louis was my maternal grandfather's middle name and Arthur was my paternal grandfather's name. They had no idea - in fact even I didn't know my maternal grandfather's middle name until I was informed by my uncle.

Birthday Concidences

My name is Dave. I went to University of Sussex in 1969. In the same guesthouse was a guy called Mike who concidentally had the same birthday as me, namely 15 Jan 1951. Interestingly he also had a twin sister called Sarah, obviously also with the same birthday. Even more strange, we were all born on the same day in the same hospital, Middlesex Hospital, and when I mentioned this to my mother she could clearly remember the birth of twins on the same day as I was born. As if that wasn't enough of a coincidence, two years later Mike, Sarah and I held a joint 21st birthday party, together with Mike's girlfriend at the time, and guess what, her birthday was on the same day as well.

A double coincidence

I was born in Hertfordshire and and lived in Surrey. My wife was born in Harrogate and then lived in Surrey. We met in 1990 and married in 1995. It transpired that her parents met in Harrogate in the 1940s at a youth club run by a Methodist minister ; he, by sheer coincidence, had been at school in Wales with my father in the 1920s, then in the 1930s married my parents and christened me. At our wedding were two guests whom I had first met in London in the early 1980s. It so happens that my new father-in-law had taken their wedding photographs in Harrogate in the 1960s.

Spilt Liquid !!

Driving from the south coast to an address in south London , I happened to have the misfortune of following a road contractors open backed truck which had open drum containers which I later learnt to my cost contained a bitumen emulsion. Whilst noticing a dirty drizzle occuring on my windscreen I had no idea whatsoever that it was emanating from these drums. I thought at the time that it was traffic film coming up from the road surface. Reaching London I navigated to the address to undertake a survey which was on the second floor overlooking the street. After a period I glanced out of the window and to my great surprise the truck I was following was parked in front of my car with its two operatives with cloths washing my car with a solution to remove the bitumen which covered the front of the car. They just happened to be contracted to fill a hole next to where I was parked and recognised that I had been following them for several miles on the main road . Upon seeing my splattered car they put two and two together, checked the open drums on their truck and realised with a concience that the were responsible for splattering my car and set about cleaning.

birthday coincidences

My brother was born on my birthday when I was six! He was my birthday present, I was told. It is lovely, now we're older, to share that special day.....neither of us appreciated it when we were children however!

Jersey

I lived with a man in Jersey, the Channel Islands, whose wife had died two years before from cancer. Her friends had set up a network of women to help with the children, shopping and housework. One was a lady called Mary. My relationship with the widower ended and I met my husband. He said he had friends in Jersey. They turned out to be Mary and her husband who had worked in the Middle East with him.

Mannah from Heaven?

In 1975 my then husband and I were on Sicily, we teamed up with an American we had met and decided to climb Mount Etna. Not realising how far it was to the crater I found myself flagging, we thought we couldn't be too far away because of the smell, but we decided to turn back to be on the safe side. We stopped to have a rest before we set off back down and I duly went behind a rock for a comfort call. Lo and behold there were 6 oranges in a pile on the floor. Why? Why did I choose that rock? Who had put them there? I will never know the answers to those questions but after 2 oranges each we had the energy to carry on and complete our mission.

three cards

My wife was playing a solitaire card games, when for no reason I ask her to shuffle the cards and draw three cards face down, I then tell her the hand.

Australian holiday

On holiday in Australia we stayed a few days in Noosa, Queensland. It rained so we went to a bar. We got talking to the only three other people; the couple lived in St Leonards-on-Sea which is a few miles from our hometown Bexhill-on-Sea. The first day back at work a customer whose car was booked in for repair that day said "I hear you had rain in Noosa". The couple had got home before us and were the customer's neighbours.

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