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!

New Zealand meeting

In 1995 we were touring New Zealand in a hire car and, when going north, pulled in to a service area at the top of Arthurs Pass. A motorhome going south had just pulled in and we both got out at the same time. We looked across and found it was a couple who lived about twenty houses down our road. Neither knew of the others holiday. The coincidence of meeting someone on the other side of the world, travelling in the opposite direction, and stopping within 20 metres within the same minute seemed truly remarkable.

Message from beyond the grave?

My wife passed away Sept' 2009 from ovarian cancer aged 49. I started to take an interest in Colin Fry's 6th Sense TV show on the Living channel. Being a sceptic, in November 2009, I decided to watch Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg Demi Moore Patrick Swayze. My daughter aged 12 was with a friend playing upstairs while I was couch- potatoing lying across the sofa watching the movie. At the point when Whoopi and Patrick arrive at Demi's flat to warn her and the only way she is going to believe in Whoopi's psychic ability is by Patrick asking for a penny from Whoopi that he then slides up the door and into Demi's hand - at that moment I had to pause the movie because my daughter had started to make such a din with her friend. I stormed upstairs to ask them to be quiet. Returning to view the film, to my disbelief, sticking up between the two flat sofa cushion seats was a penny. Nothing unusual from this lying position if other change had been in evidance - but looking underneath the cushions there was absolutely no other change. I've kept the penny!

Cousins

When my son started school,the headmaster said there were already children with the same surname at the school and were we related? We said no,but later found out that their dad was my husband's cousin. My husband hadn't seen his cousin for about 30 years when they lived over 10 miles away.The chances of them both ending up living in the same town and going to the same school must be slim,especially as there are several first schools in our town.

Meeting in a baby clinic

In the 1980's I lived in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. I had taken my 2 children, (a toddler and a new baby) to the baby clinic for the usual weighing and checks. I asked another mum in the clinic to hold my baby while I took my older child out of his pushchair and took off his coat. She immediately recognised me ~ as we used to sit next to each other at school ~ not in Stevenage ~ over 100 miles away in Aldridge, Staffordshire over 18 years previously.

Babysitting catchup in Patagonia

In October, 2006, my sister and I joined a group of 18 people from North Wales for a 3 week visit to Patagonia in Argentina, where there is a large Welsh immigrant community. We travelled from Buenos Aires to the Andes and then across the pampas to Gaiman on the east coast. There, we attended a party where about 200 people (some tourists but mostly Patagonians) were celebrating the end of the Patagonian Eisteddfod. An elderly man came up to me and asked (in Welsh) if I was enjoying myself, and where had I come from. I answered "Penycae, a little village in North Wales." "Oh," he said, "I used to know an old lady who lived in Penycae. Her name was Catrin and she married a farmer called Goronwy". "That's my mother you're talking about!" I exclaimed. The man continued, "Catrin used to babysit me and my brothers when she lived next door to us in Denbigh." My mother left Denbigh at the age of 19, and died in 2004 at the age of 88, so he was talking about the early 1930s, 70 years ago.

A British, American, Australian Coincidence

In 1985 I was a British Army officer serving on an exchange with the Australian Army in Queensland. Just before my wife and I returned to the UK we took some friends out to a meal. The owner of the little restaurant asked if we would like a girl who played the zither to play during the meal, to which we agreed. We arrived early for the meal to make sure all was OK and the girl, an American, arrived to set up. I chatted to her and during the course of the conversation I said that I had been to the USA only once in 1977 when I had visited the two friends I knew there - one living in LA, the other in Washington DC. As she told me that she lived in Washington and the conversation was flowing I told her that my friend worked for the National Geographic magazine. She replied that she knew a number of people who worked for the National Geographic and asked me his name. I told her that it was Olly xxxxx to which she replied that she knew Olly and his wife really well. I am not a statistician but the odds on my meeting an American in Australia who knew one of the two people I know living in the USA must be astronomical.

Friday the 13th

Royal Masonic School for Girls Rickmansworth I am a teacher and yesterday (Friday 13th) was on lunchtime duty (1.30 - 2 pm) in the common room used by our year 8s . Four girls were playing pool in a miniature table (about 2 m by 80 cm). One girl hit a ball, which bounced off the table, into the glass door, smashing the glass. The ball was the number 13 ball.

A strange meeting!

My husband had recently died and I was feeling very low. I was walking through an Aberetum and saw an elderly lady sitting looking a bit lonely and not very well, I went to sit beside her. We started to talk and she told me that she had angina. When I told her my name she said that she had had a dear friend many years before who had danced with her in the Larbon company in London. The lady was my husbands Aunt who had lived with us in her last years and who I had been very fond of. The lady and I became close till she sadly died but I felt she came into my life at a very auspicious moment.

Student accommodation

My son spent the last three years of his time at Bath Uni., living in the same room. After graduation he went to work in Marseille. Two years later another british graduate arrived to work in my son's department. He had been the next occupant of the room in Bath.

divine intervention

In the autumn of last year I went with my husband to a beach in Heysham, Lancashire and during the walk and to the entry to the cliffs area we walked down a busy road for about two to three hundred yards. As we approached within 25 yards of the turn off I could see in the distance something shiny in the grass verge by the road and as I reached the place I picked up the object that was to my surprise a silver brooch. As my husband and I examined the brooch we both commented how similar it was to one that I would wear some days on a jacket that I was not wearing on that particular occasion. Bemused by this when we got home we searched out the jacket to compare the likeness of the brooch found with the one on my jacket and to our suprise the brooch was missing. We then went on to think out when we had last visited the beach road while wearing the jacket and it had to be two or three days before. We found this amazing because we didn't know that I had lost the brooch and then to find it in a prominent place on a busy road in grass with many tourists about three days later, was frankly thought provoking.

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