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!

Coincidence in itself

I have always been interested in coincidences. The comment 'It's just a coincicidence' always seemed too dismissive. However, I nearly didn't know about the Cambridge study. I was lying in bed this morning reluctant to get up because it was Saturday. Radio 4 had gone off automatically at its usual time. I turned it back on, hoping for an interesting item, just in time to hear the request for coincidences.

Birthday Coincidence

My daughter was born on the same day as her dad, 27th October, her daughter stayed snuggly inside her mummy's womb, waiting to be born on the same day as her mum and grandad. The dr's though had other ideas, so because she was 2 weeks overdue the dr's wouldn't wait a day longer and the baby was induced one day before her mums and grandad's birthday! Also my son's baby is due about his birthday in July?

unlikely event venue

Last week I contacted a website called www.loveahappyending.com (LAHE) that features 30 authors from UK, US and Canada. My novels have a happy ending so I enquired about how I could join. Firstly, a writer in Lanzarote who runs another blog I belong to called www.famousfiveplus.blogspot.com had apparently just left LAHE as she would be unable to support the upcoming big book event LAHE is running in June. I could fill that vacancy. Secondly, this event, a book festival, is in a little place in Cotswolds called Tetbury - you know near where Prince Charles Lives? Oh, and it'll be in Sir William Romney's School - MY SCHOOL! I was born and bred in Tetbury, lived there until I was 18. My father was the Maths teacher. All pure and uncanny coincidence.

Same birthday

In the sixties my friend ended up sharing a flat with two other women in Edinburgh....on discussing their birthdays one day my friend had exactly the same birthday as one of her flatmates, and the same place of birth (a small village hospital in the Highlands)....after investigations it turned out that their mothers were in adjacent beds in that hospital!

Chinese Take Away

About a month ago I got in my car to collect a chinese meal from our local called Hong Take Away. Just after the radio came on, Honk Kong Garden by Siouxsie and the Banshees (a seventies song about a chinese take away) started to play on the radio. The song lasted for exactly the duration of the trip. For a while there I thought somebody had decided to accompany my life with a soundtrack. I'm game if they want to do it more.

Fancy meeting you here!

On a canal boating holiday in Yorkshire (where I live) in the early 1980s, as our boat glided under a footbridge, I saw a man whom I knew crossing the bridge above us. He was the manager of a small bookshop in Glasgow on whom I called in my day job as a publisher's rep. I hailed him and we had a brief chat.

chance encounter

Travelling from Cumbria back to Leicester My friend suggested we stop in Lancaster for coffee.On the way back to the car my friend saw a small dress shop and suggested going in.During a conversation with the owner ,it transpired that she and my friend had both lived in Nigeria at the same time and travelled on the same boat.Further conversation revealed that she had owed a public house in a village in SW Lancashire where my friend and I had once lived!

Car Reversing

Last summer we were on a walking holiday and were walking from our campsite behind Deal/Walmer in Kent towards the coastal path. We crossed over a fairly busy road and then down a residential street with cars parked on the roadway and on driveways. As we were passing one house a gentleman was trying to reverse onto the road and as he was having difficulty seeing because of the parked cars my husband stood in the road and beckoned him out for which he was most grateful. We continued on our walk and later on in the afternoon (about 5/6 hours later) we walked back up the same street to find the same gentleman attempting to back out of his drive so - again - my husband helped him out.

favourite book

I'd recently got an 18mth old dog that was keen to chew everything when I was out of the house. When I came back one day, she'd started on my books on the bookcase and had chewed my favourite old bible that contained passages of Ecclesiasticus, difficult to find in many old bibles, and the wording of which in older English is very beautiful to me. Picking up the scattered and ripped pages and looking to see just how badly damaged Ecclesiasticus was, I was amazed to see they were the only pages almost completetly intact and readable. That was 11 years ago and the pages are still in use.

Chance meeting

In the early 1970s, while working in Helsinki, a Russian colleague, noting that I came from London, expressed surprise that I didn't know another person he had met from London, as though it was a village where we all knew one another. Not to mention that the person had a common name, probably held by hundreds of Londoners. In 1977, I went to work in New York. Later, a colleague who had arrived the very same week as me mentioned a trip she had made to Russia. And yes, she was the person the Russian in Helsinki had thought I ought to know. We became friends and still are.

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