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!

Met on an aeroplane

I was returning from Australia and had to change planes at Singapore. As I was settling into my seat, I saw a couple from my church, about 5 rows in front of me. They were even more surorised than I was; I did at least know they had been in Australia, but they had no idea that I had.

Geographical

I bought a new green Renault 5 in 1974 from my local garage. I asked for the registration number 777 but was told by the garage that the number had been given to another new green Renault 5 the previous day so I had 778. A few months later after driving through France, and whilst waiting at the border with Spain before going through the Pyrenees I noticed that the car two places in front of me was the green Renault 777.

Family Birthdays

I knew somebody in Bristol years ago who had two sons, born a year apart on their father's birthday. She then produced twin girls. 3 birthdays between six people!

Neighbours

Some 30 years ago I attended a housewarming party. At this party, unbeknown to me, was a couple (who I had never met before and, in fact, didn't speak to during the course of the party and don't remember even seeing) who, when we moved to the other side of the country 20 years later, turned out to be our next door neighbours - although it was some years before we established this fact, and only after after we both realised that the people giving the housewarming party were acquaintances (not even close friends) of both of us.

Radio Words

I have Radio 4 on most of the day and have noticed that as I read a word at the exact moment it is also spoken on the radio. I have tried to contemplate how to work out the odds of this happening but cannot get anywhere near a solution apart from thinking it must be something to do with the number of words (different words?) spoken on R4 compared to the number I read during a certain period. I did start to record these words but soon got bored: Below are the ones I did record. Regards Tony Ross Important, police, guns, city, know, midday, temptation, description, mentioned, people, go-down, room, great, more, tourist, married, yourself, yourself, Jim, standing, time Paris, garden, family, Catholic, worth it, gilded, murder,14, brand, years, cash, security, steaks (stakes), alive, magic, form, progressive, skull, world, down, law, studio, energy, mrs, what to do, forward, clear, long, images, Britain, back, studies, no, passengers, good morning, yes, London, church, mail (male), burly (Burleigh) Adam Seldom

Old Friends

We bought an apartment in Tenerife so that I could spend winter in the sun. My husband came out from the Midlands, where we moved some 20 years ago, to visit me but as he had a meeting in London on the Monday, flew back to Gatwick. On the flight, which he would never normally have taken, he met someone he used to play cricket with 30 years ago when we lived in the London area. They asked him if he'd been to see Lyn and Gordon, who live in Tenerife. Lyn was one of my best friends until we moved to the Midlands and we lost touch as she moved too. Of course, we got in touch and are once again very good friends. I've got other stories as this sort of thing happens to me quite a lot, but this is the best by far as it reunited us.

10 years apart!

A friend of mine, Sheila, has the same birth date 10 years earlier than me - her youngest son Graham was born 10 years to the day before my youngest Sarah - Sarah has now moved opposite to Graham and his wife, whom she had no knowledge of, to a town she would never have considered except for a change of job.

Research

In the early 1990s I was researching material for a book about the fate of the relics (that is, the bones) of Canterbury and England's great saint, Thomas Becket. The official story was that they had been burned at the time of the Reformation in 1538, but there was circumstantial evidence that they may have been removed from his shrine before the arrival of the King's Commissioners and kept in a secret place by the monks, where they may still lie. In investigating this possibility, I stumbled across the story of the accidental discovery in Canterbury Cathedral in 1888 of a skeleton that bore many striking similarities to what is known about Becket's stature and the manner of his death. For more than half a century, many people believed that these were the long-lost relics of St Thomas, and, in order to settle the matter, in 1949 the Dean and Chapter passed the bones to Professor Alexander Cave, at St Batholomew's Hospital in London, for a full forensic examination.

Bri/yans in Brussels

One evening when my husband and I were on our honeymoon in Brussels we walked quite a way out of the city centre and we met Bryan, the husband of my best friend in Oxford. He was visiting the European Commission for his work and was taking an evening walk with his colleague, Brian. A few days later my husband and I were walking to the railway station to go on to stay with friends in Germany when we met my boss from Oxford. He was also called Brian. Given that my husband's name is Brian, I felt a little outnumbered on this trip. Jo

Alfred Hitchcock's dogs

In the 1960s when I was little we had a Sealyham terrier, a breed of dog that is far from common. I am interested in film trivia. As you are perhaps aware, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock often made cameo appearances in his films. Early on in his film 'The Birds' he is seen leaving a pet shop with two Sealyham terriers on leads. One time while I was trawling the Internet looking at film trivia I came upon the fact that these two dogs were Hitchcock's own pet Sealyhams. Their names were Geoffrey and Stanley. My name is Geoffrey and my father's name is Stanley.

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