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!

Matching Vivid Memories

This morning i woke up with a vivid memory of this atheletic choker like necklace. A little background about the necklace In 2010 while i was in 5th grade they were a fad lots of my peers wore them, they were suppose to give you energy or something weird like that but really it just caught on because everyone was wearing them especially atheletes. I always wanted one never got one though. anyway this morning (2019) I woke up and started havinf a vivid memory about all of this even picturing a the dark blue choker like cord with writing on it and circles on the ends. I hadnt thought about these stupid necklaces pratically since the fad ended and people stopped talking about them which was rather quick so it was a quite random memory. Then later today at 12 pm i went on instagram and there was a post from my friend who i didnt go to school with and never had those necklaces nor have we ever talked about them.

Died on same date

My mother Lillian died on January 6,2002 around 4:00 pm This year her brother Michael and my fathers brother Roy both died January 6, 2019. One at 2:30 am the other at 4:00 pm.

Strange coincidence in Lab

I cannot remimber the date , but it was in 2016 , while I was working in Laboratory in Riyadh , as a unit assistant . I receive a lab request with a patient name Saleha Suliman Alessi , and immediately at the same time , another patient with exactly the same name , came with her request !!! I wounder how such uncommon name came at the same time with different MR numbers came together . I asked them : do you know each other , they replayd NO .

Sons Meeting

I’m a designer. I was sitting with a couple designing their kitchen. Had two meetings over two weeks to finalise things. Towards the end of our final meeting I asked if they had children that lived nearby, & we discovered our sons had been in jazz band together in high school in New Jersey. Then we found out they both live in the same area in Boston. We said we would text our sons that night to see if they remembered each other. (It’s been 8 years).When I texted my son that night, he said he was surprised my customer’s son had reached out to him several days before (they were never “friends”) & was going to attend my son’s upcoming show. This was a few days before we even knew they knew each other!!!<br />

Sons Meeting

I’m a designer. I was sitting with a couple designing their kitchen. Had two meetings over two weeks to finalise things. Towards the end of our final meeting I asked if they had children that lived nearby, & we discovered our sons had been in jazz band together in high school in New Jersey. Then we found out they both live in the same area in Boston. We said we would text our sons that night to see if they remembered each other. (It’s been 8 years).When I texted my son that night, he said he was surprised my customer’s son had reached out to him several days before (they were never “friends”) & was going to attend my son’s upcoming show. This was a few days before we even knew they knew each other!!!

Professor

There are two aspects of this coincidence. Firstly, from my point of view I was behaving completely out of character, and secondly the actual coincidence is fairly unlikely. However, the chance of both situations arising is unusual. One morning, probably well before Justin Timberlake was born, I was obsessed by the name 'Timberlake' that would not stop going through my mind. At one stage I was climbing a flight of stairs and I stopped and told myself to get the name out of my head. That evening on the news I heard that someone called Timberlake had been killed in a road accident that morning. I am certain that I could not have heard this news during the day, but I had been reading C. P. Snow's 'The Masters' and one of the characters in a Horace Timberlake.

Professor

My mind must work in a strange way. One Saturday morning I was thinking that because Gautama Buddha developed a philosophy that was truly revolutionary he was probably much smarter than Jesus. Even today, Buddha's empiricism and scepticism seem very modern. An hour or so after thinking this I entered my local post office and picked up a book of lists, and the compiler obviously had the same idea that I had just had because Buddha's IQ was listed as about 160 (from memory) but Jesus' was about 130. It is a coincidence that I had been thinking of this immediately before coming across the book of lists. Also on a Saturday morning I had done some simple arithmetic and decided that on average a given child would be abducted only once every 200,000 years (probably a longer duration than the existence of modern humans). That morning I entered a local supermarket and read in The Australian newspaper that a child would on average be abducted only once in 200,000 years. Again, it is a coincidence that I had worked out the same result just before I went to the supermarket.

Professor

I was travelling on a 747 between Sydney, Australia, and London when a noticed a family sitting a few seats away from me, who had got on the plane at Sydney. On arrival in London, I caught a tube to St Pancras station and then a train to Nottingham. I eventually arrived at my friend's house in Beeston. He told me that his next door neighbour had that day returned from Australia. Lo and behold! It was the person who had been on the same plane as me. The chances of this happening are very small indeed. Travelling on the same flight from Australia to the next house to my friend's.

The Butterfly and the Diving Bell

I'm at the doc, waiting. Nurse comes in to do vitals, sees my Kindle, asks what I'm reading. Then while she does vitals, tells me at length about book she just read, "The Butterfly and the Diving Bell", which I'd never heard of. Two hours later at home, reading a different book, a character describes a book that sounds just like "Butterfly", and then names it.

Mrs

Living next door. On 23rd June 2018 I was waiting for a ferry from the Shetland Mainland to Yell. Got into conversation with a Yell resident. In time she asked me where I was from and then informed me her daughter's partner had just got a job in that town. Six months later her daughter and partner purchased the house next door to me: there had been no contact between the woman on Yell and me since that conversation in June, and her daughter and partner did not know I was their next door neighbour until the day they moved in.

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