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!

telephone number

30 or more years ago we lived in Banstead, Surrey. During that time husband's parents moved from Surrey to the Ramsgate area in Kent. With no phone connection at their bungalow we urged them to get a phone put in so that we could have ease of contact and they made the arrangements. Imagine our surprise when they told us their new phone number - Thanet 3xxx18, our number in Banstead was also 3xxx18 (can't remember the area code). There was no direct dialling at that time and it always caused a double check from the operator that they had heard correctly and a comment that it was probably a several million to one chance. Have a couple of others, will post them separately. Kate

stopping clock

My Aunt bought me a small clock for a wedding present, one day it stopped working for no reason. I then found out some weeks later it stopped at the time she had died. It has never worked since

birthday coincidence

When deciding to call my new baby daughter Katherine I wanted to ensure I spelt her name correctly when registering her birth. I remembered that Katharine Hepburn was in a film on television that week so I looked up her name in the cast list in the Radio Times magazine and spelt it the same way. I would joke that Katharine had been named after Katharine Hepburn. A year or so later on reading an article about her somewhere I learnt that Katharine Hepburn was born on May 12th, the same birthday as my daughter's.

holiday meeting

About 12 years ago, my aunt and i visited relations in New Hampshire America , the only time i had visited, we were invited to a cousins graduation in Boston. Whilst there we did some sightseeing and stopped to talk to a policeman on horseback. Another tourist tapped me on the shoulder and said "excuse me i hear from your accent you are Welsh, which part of the country do you come from ?. I said South Wales a town which you probably don,t know . we then established he did indeed know the town, the street i used to live on and that he lived in the row in front of mine and we had both lived there at the same time. This would have been back in the 1970,s.,

I used to babysit for my son's infant school teacher

When my son (who shares his birthday with his grandmother and also the wedding anniversary of his other grandparents) moved into year 1 in infant school, his teacher looked vaguely familiar. When she wrote her full name in his reading book, I realised that 15 years previously, when I was 18 and she was 10, I used to babysit for her and her sister, in a village 25 miles away from where we live now.

Mrs (Gillian Beaumont)

Out of the blue, my husband started to talk about our longstanding wish to visit California, and I replied that since we hadn't got around to it in 40 years we were unlikely ever to do so. I then powered up my computer, only to find an e-mail from a holiday company with which we'd previously travelled, advertising an interesting trip there at a reasonable price. Readers, we booked and are off in May!

Pregnancy and baby DOB coincidences

I have once sold a maternity dress via EBay to a buyer who emailed me to say the dress – although new- had a small tear, never the less, she left me positive feedback. This prompted me to reply and we have kept in touch. We were both pregnant at the time, both expecting a baby (one in Sept and the other one in Oct). We found out that we were both born on the 22nd day of a different month, our lucky number was 22, and we both ending up giving birth on our husband’s birthdays in the end (in Sept and in Oct) despite the fact that our babies' due date was not the one we had given birth in. We both hate make up and perfume. Although we never met, we are in regular contact and are good friends.

TWIN RELATED

I live in Leicestershire and went on holiday with a friend after cancer treatment to Llandudno. My hair was just growing back so I thought I won't wear a wig now as no one one here will know me At the hotel after our evening meal, I sat in the conservatory with my back to the conservatory door when a lady approached me and asked me if I had a sister called Susan? I was shocked. Yes, as a twin, I was use to people thinking I was my sister but in Wales and looking so very different, I couldn't believe it! I said I did and she said she use to work with Susan and knew she was a twin. I asked for her name so that I could pass her greetings to my sister on my return. When she told me her name I said I use to work with a man with that surname. She shouted to her husband to come over and low and behold he turned out to be the twin brother of the man I use to work with! I was the twin to someone she use to work with and he was the twin of someone I use work with! How amazing is that?

Words and numbers coincidences.

I should add to my earlier comment about the instantaneous repetition of numbers that these have ranged from single digits to eight.

PIN NUMBER

To help remember credit card PIN numbers, I used to make a dummy entry in my filofax, like, e.g., Norman West or Barclay Plastics. I would enter a fake phone number, say 0207 314 7654, the last four digits being the PIN number. To make the entry look more authentic, I would also enter another random number for FAX. When I upgraded my Barclaycard, I was allocated a new PIN number. I went to the entry in my filofax to amend the phone number, only to find that my new PIN was precisely the fax number I had invented some years before !!

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