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!

A friend made by a coincidence

My wife and I were visiting a small town when we decided to have a cup of tea before catching the train home. There were several cafes in the town centre and we chose one at random. On the counter, there were several old magazines and I chose one at random. In it was a letter from a man in Canada who wanted to be put in touch with me - I'd written an article for the magazine earlier. I got in touch with him and we corresponded for a while. Seven years later my wife and I were planning on a Canadian holiday. From what we remembered about the Canadian, we trawled the internet and eventually discovered him. We were in email contact within minutes. On holiday in Vancouver, we visited him and discovered that his apartment number was 2370, the WWI army number of my grandfather.

My royal family

My great grandmother was the same age as the queen mother. Her daughter, my grandmother is the same age as the queen. Her son, married my mum- who would be the same age as princess Diana. My sister and I are unfortunately just a bit younger than Harry and Wills but with the same age gap. I met my husband a few years ago and his mum mentioned the uncanny coincidence that he and his brother are the same age as Harry and Prince William. We got engaged in 2009 but the William and Kate beat us to it and got married just before we did. I was convinced her wedding dress would be a copy of mine, thankfully though they werent too similar.

Names

In the early 1980s, my husband and I and our 4 small children had a camping holiday in Middleton-in-Teesdale, (in County Durham and visited all the local sights. On a visit to Raby Castle, we were spoken to by a lady who had heard me calling to two of my sons, Matthew and Adam - she asked the name of the third son, Stephen and told us that she had three grandsons with the same names. They also had a younger sister. Some years later, my Aunt, who lived in North Wales, decided to move up to Chester-le-Street, County Durham, to a retirement flat, to be nearer to her nephew. She knew no-one in the immediate area, but was invited for a cup of tea by the lady in the next flat. Whilst she was there, she admired a picture of the lady's grandchildren on the wall - when she was told their names, she commented that her great nephews had the same names - it turned out that her neighbour was the lady we had met in Raby Castle and we were able to meet her and share the memories when we visited.

Matching keys

My wife is an actress and it is her habit always to keep a small memento or keepsake from every production or play she has participated in. When she moved in with me to my London house in 1998 she was unpacking a box of her stuff and I asked her, "Why is my cottage key here?" "That's my key," she said, "it's from a play I was in." I went and found my actual key - one of those large, old-fashioned types - and holding them together we found they were identical. So identical, in fact, that it actually opened the door to the cottage. Her favourite part of the story? Hers has a Number 1 on it, mine a Number 2. I still have the keys as proof.

Traffic situations

I have observed this as a jogger/walker/cyclist and driver. When on a fairly quiet road the frequency with which two vehicles travelling in different direction cross at the exact place where there is a walker/runner/cyclist, often necessitating one vehicle to slow down, is much greater than I would expect. On occasions one can travel miles with few or no other vehicles coming then at the very moment there is a slow moving individual on foot or on a bike a vehicle appears. I know this does not fit your categories but I am curious to know if there is any basis to this intuitive belief of mine.

Surprising meeting abroad

In 2000 we took our daughter to Disneyland in Orlando. We stopped for lunch in a themed restaurant and joined the queue for a table. Immediately before us in the queue were one of my daughters schoolfriends and her family. None of us knew that both families were there at the same time.

Crash

My coincidence was that i got hit of my moped in the 90s and slid along the road into the path of a bus,luckily for me someone had just stepped onto the zebra crossing stopping the bus which would have otherwise ran over me,unfortunately a few weeks later i was sat reading the local Bristol eveningpost paper and i read that a man had been killed in a road accident on the same part i had and the coincidence was he had the same forename and surname as myself. RIP Matthew S.

Old car coincidence

As a child my parents used to send myself and my two siblings away for a two week summer holiday and we used to be dropped off at a London station to meet the party we were travelling with. This time we pulled up to park behind our old car, a Morris traveller, which we had sold some years previously locally in Norwich. We were not in a position to meet the current owner, but as we seldom made the trip to London (annually generally three trips - to be dropped off and then to be picked up for our holiday, and the annual Christmas visit to relatives) it was very strange to end up directly behind our old car!

Meeting abroad.

In 1989 I sold a house and gave my daughter £500 for a ski holiday with friends. The first morning on the piste she encountered her cousin, whom she hadn't seen for some time. He was with a totally unconnected party, and neither had any idea that the other was going on a ski trip.

Experience and Language

I have thought extensively over the subject of 'Co-incidences' and have examples in all sorts of contexts and variations. They range from the instance when travelling from Trinidad to Barbados and sitting next to a lady from Trinidad we were given landing forms to complete - and on doing so noticed that we shared the exact same birth date; more complex and perhaps not quite so coincidental (or actually in a greater depth) concerns a current project I have in hand: I am marking my late father's hundredth birthday this year with a concert at St. Leonard's, Shoreditch in June (part of the Spitalfields Festival - so the venue is their arrangement). Part of the background to the work I have commissioned is my father (and grandfather's) involvement as wood turners with the furniture trade of Shoreditch; in later life my father wrote a history of immigrant furniture makers in Britain and installed a bench in his father's name in the garden of the Geffrye Museum.

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