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!

Simultaneous event

20-odd years ago , it was decided that we should play a game of Trivial Pursuit one afternoon. I am not usually a 'board game' person but when I have to, and have a choice, I always opt for the more scientific questions rather than entertainment ones. At one point I had no option but to answer an entertainment question by giving the title of a song and at that precise moment the song started to play on the radio in the background. I tried to think of how many things had to happen to allow this and to me it was mindboggling. The odd time I was caught to play, the decision to play that game, the fact that I was forced to choose that category of question and the one question out of all the entertainment questions in the box. All this to match the radio station playlist at precisely the same time. To me....spooky! And no I didn't win the game. Richard Church

Same wavelength - different continent!

We had friends from Australia staying with us for 3 months. I had lent the wife of the couple one of my fleece jackets as they didn't have any warm outer-wear. They returned to Australia and several weeks later I decided to sort through the cupboards in our guest bedroom and underneath the fleece jacket on the same hanger was a lightweight jumper. I knew it wasn't mine and deduced it belonged to our friend who had inadvertently left it behind. At the very moment I had my hand on the sleeve of the jumper, our 'phone rang. It was our friend from Australia to say she was also sorting through her clothes and realised she had a jumper missing and was calling me to ask if I could have a look to see if she had left it behind! We both went cold when we realised she had called at the precise moment I had found the jumper.

Lucky escape?

Back in 1978/79, as part of my degree course, I was working for a year as an English assistant in French school. I decided to pay my parents in London a surprise visit in the February half-term. I was on a ferry from Dieppe to Newhaven in the middle of the night, in dense fog. I struck up a conversation with an Australian nurse in the cafe, over a coffee. After a while we decided to go up to the lounge deck. When we got there, as I opened the door and looked in I felt there was a very eery green light in there, and something told me not to go in. We went back to the cafe and had another coffee. About 10 minutes later there was a huge shudder, the ship lurched and all the cutlery etc fell off the tables. Everyone looked shocked, but nothing was said-I wondered if we had somehow hit the dock in the fog-even though there had been none of the usual announcements regarding imminent arrival/docking etcetera. For ages all we heard was an announcement asking for a pupil ( a boys name I think) to return to his school party. We were told nothing whatsoever until they announced we were docking back in Dieppe.

My partner and my family name coincidence

My fathers name is Lee My aunties names are Lynne and Deborah My partners mothers name is Deborah My partners auntie and uncles names are Lynne and Lee

calling my best friend

As a teenager, I wanted to chat with my best friend during a school break. It was the days before mobiles, and we might chat once a week on our parent's phone in the hall, rather than every day! It had been a while since we'd talked and so I called up her one evening. Her phone was engaged. Five minutes later, she called and said she'd tried to call a few minutes before, but my line was engaged. We'd called at exactly the same time and engaged both our telephone numbers! We are still best friends thirty years on.

mrs w

During backpacking around europe the last place I visited was Paris. Whilst in Paris I went on the Eiffel tower to the top floor to walk straight into my younger cousin Sarah who was on her school trip to france. Neither of us had any idea that we were in the same country let alone in Paris. Not only that but we share the same birthday 27th of Febuary. Sarah was born on my 9th birthday. When we meet there we phoned our family straight away and no one could believe we were there at the same time. What are the odd's of that.

Telephone Numbers

My Aunty Mary rang me up one day to tell me that she had just had a telephone installed. It was the first one that she had ever had and she was excited and was ringing round all her friends and relatives to tell them. I asked her to wait a moment while I fetched a pen and paper so that I could make a note of her number. She told me that there was no need for me to note the number since it was the same as mine. She lived in the Nottingham telephone area and I lived just over the border in Derby so we had different area codes. We did however have the same 7 digit land line number.

'telepathic' outburst

When I was a teenager and still living at home, I was watching the start of some kind of quiz show. The host was just about to introduce this male contestant when I had the urge to call out a name. So I said to my parents something like, "Brian Watson", just as the show's host said, "This evening ladies and gentleman we have with us Brian Watson..." I know I surprised myself, not to mention my parents, but we never discussed the amazing coincidence.

270,000 to one......

One day I was sitting at my dining room table trying to finish The Daily Telegraph Cryptic Crossword. My daughter and her partner were in the room. I needed to find a 6-letter word H-D--- and I reached for my Chambers Crossword Completer which contains over 270,000 words. I had almost found the H-D--- section when my daughter gave a loud, unexpected hiccup. I called her to the table with the words 'Look, I am not moving my finger. Come and see this'. You have guessed it of course. My finger was on the word Hiccup.

Relative round the corner

I was adopted as a 6 week old baby and grew up happily in a small town with my adoptive parents. I knew nothing of my "real" background and, as a child, really wasn't all that interested. At 18, I secured a place at Edinburgh University to study Biology . I suppose that approaching adult gave me more motivaion to find out a bit more about my birth mother so, in my third year, I made my way to Register House and obtained a copy of my full birth certificate which listed my mother's name and address at that time which was a tiny village on the far west coast of Scotland. I wrote a brief letter and posted it off. Several weeks later I had a phone call from my birth mother. She had moved away from the address I had written to her at which was her parents' home. She was obviously surprised to receive my letter but her emotions at re-discovering her child were compounded by the extraordinary coincidence that she now lived in the neighbouring street to my student flat and worked at the University as secretary to my director of studies.

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