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!

Chance meeting

My wife and I had traveled from Suffolk to York to visit our son for a few days. The day we returned home we knew that our friends from down the road were themselves traveling to Yorkshire to visit her parents so at some point we would pass each other on the A1. We stopped at Blyth Services for a cuppa and to our surprise and theirs met them in the toilets. They had only stopped for a few moments to use the toilets and couldn't believe it was us standing there!

Three siblings share same birthday

My husband is the eldest of seven children. Two of his sisters and one brother were born on 4 th February. They are the second,fourth and sixth children. Their mother is still alive at 92!

shopping

When on holiday in West Australia, we went to a place called Kalbarrie where we went into a gift shop. There was only one other couple and the store keeper in the shop, on speaking to shop keeper he said "I know you come from UK, where about" so we told him and he said before he emigrated he lived 2 miles away from us, what a coincidence, we thought, until the other couple who live in Port Headland, WA said we used to live in the next road from ours. So that was 5 people in a little seaside town, miles from anywhere that all lived within 2 miles of each other.

college classmate

There was this girl in my freshman business math class about 5 years ago. My ex girlfriend disliked her because she would come and study at my apartments sometimes. I completely lost touch with the girl in my business class.... I found my self on the highway that I would take to get to college. While on this route I randomly began to think about this girl.....About two weeks later I was in Austin, TX for training for a new job. On the very last day of training we went to visit a property of only 5 employees. One of the employees was the girl that was in my business math class! What are the odds of that??!

We are related!

I was working with with a lady who happened to say she was off to visit relations in Stoke on trent I replied I have relations in Stoke on Trent after we swapped names the lady went off and mentioned our conversation to her aunt, it eventually transpired we were related the lady at work has now been part of our family for over 27yrs and as she had no family of her own our friendship over the years has been a real blessing...............

Showtime coincidence

My name is Christine and my husband and I had booked to see the show 'Celtic Woman' last September (2011) at a venue in Birmingham as part of my 60th birthday celebrations so we were dissappointed when the show was cancelled a couple of weeks before we were due to see it. We had also booked a long weekend in Paris to celebrate and a few days before we went I looked on the 'Celtic Woman' website and to my surprise saw that they were appearing in Paris for one night only which happened to be the night we arrived in Paris! When we arrived in Paris we took a taxi straight to the venue without even unpacking and were able to see the show after all!

Chance meeting.

I was in hospital for a knee operation, and during that time I got to know one of the male nurses on the ward. My fiancee also worked at the hospital, on the administration side, and also knew this nurse because of this. About 3 years later my fiancee and I got married, and decided we would go to Australia on the £10 assisted passage. A few years later we were relaxing with some friends, on a little beach south of Sydney. We saw some people walking towards us, and when they got close we saw that one of them was the nurse we had both first met at the hospital. When we first met neither of us had thought of going to Australia. That was nearly 50 years ago, and we never met again afterwards.

Meeting an acquaintance coincidence

I live in a village in North Oxfordshire with a population of under 2500 people. In the Nineties I was working as a Sales Manager for a Finnish company and was travelling extensively in the UK & Southern Ireland. Around 1994/5 I was on a business trip to Helsinki, Finland. Having checked in, I was walking through the Departure Hall in Terminal 1 when I spotted and waived to, an acquaintance from the village who was in one of the check-in queues with his wife. Having boarded my flight into Business class I was surprised when the same couple boarded into Economy on the same flight. We subsequently had a conversation when I found out that he had moved from the village to somewhere in the Midlands. He was travelling to Japan, via Helsinki, to visit his daughter who was living there. Helsinki was not a common destination for British people in the mid Nineties. Three or four years later, I was on business in the South West and was staying in a Hotel in Looe, Cornwall. At Dinner, the next table was occupied by two elderly ladies and during their meal they were visited by a gentleman who turned out to the same acquaintance! One of the ladies was his mother.

A Meeting in New Zealand

In 1984 my husband and I were visiting our friends in New Zealand and had been lent their car to drive around North Island. We had been told that the Bay of Islands was worth a visit but when we tried to book a trip on the official boat we were told that it was fully booked for the one and only day we could manage. We turned and were about to drive away when we were called back to the boatyard to be told that someone had just cancelled their trip so we snapped up the chance to go out the following morning. On that boat I commented to my husband that one of the men looked like John Betjeman, with his long shorts, socks, sandals and white cotton hat. It so happened that we sat next to the same man, at lunch on the beach. In talking we found that we all came from the same area in London, we recently, but he many years before WW2. We then went on to find that this gentleman and his brother came from the same street in Brixton, South London as my husband and indeed were two of the five Jackson brothers who lived only two doors down from my husband and his family, at that time. We exchanged current addresses and wrote Christmas cards to each other for some years.

Same name sharing

Many years ago on a day out in Cambridge I went with friends into a church. On leaving I said I wanted to sign the visitors book. One of my friends was looking at the visitors book and said 'But you've already signed it'. When I looked someone else named Sally Hughes had signed immediately before I was going to sign! We were amazed when the 'other' Sally Hughes come over to us, having heard her name mentioned and she was still in the church. Hughes was my then maiden name, she was a Hughes by marriage. Until that point neither of us had ever met anyone with the same name. Very strange - but true.

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