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!

The Specials

On the way to work one day, I played a one track live mix CD in my car. It was made several years prior by a friend of mine who is an MC /DJ. I put it in the CD player as I was leaving my driveway and it played for about 5 minutes before I stopped and turned the car off at a local petrol station where i picked up a car-sharing colleague and bought a coffee. Got back in the car and hit the motorway. It was late winter and was snowing for the first time that season. I had had a bit of an awakening a few days earlier and was discussing synchronicity with my friend, as a song by the Specials came on in the mix, a song called Blank Expression. The opening line is "snow is falling all around, 7 o clock and the roads are dark". At this exact moment I glanced at the clock and it was indeed 7 o clock and was snowing heavily on this dark winter morning.

flat hunt - same flat

About 17 years ago, I lived in a great 3-bedroom apartment with my erstwhile partner and small child. When we split up I was really upset (amongst other things!) at having to leave behind the flat where we lived. I even considered buying out my partner and taking in a lodger so I wouldn't have to move. It was just perfect in terms of layout, location, light, quiet, privacy... I ended up having to move into a much smaller two-bedroom. Finally, seven years ago, I was in a position to look for a three-bedroom apartment for myself and my son. I had narrowed my search down to an area measuring about one square kilometer in the south zone of Rio de Janeiro (where I had continued to live since my separation) - an area chockablock with apartment buildings. I ended up seeing 12 flats that fitted my criteria, but all were wrong in one way or another - facing a busy road, bad layout, kitchen too small, etc. Then I was shown my 13th flat and, to my utter disbelief, it was in the very same building I had lived in with my partner. But not only that: it was in the same column - i.e., three floors above the very flat I had so loved - so even better than the original, with more light.

We both live the same life

am from Chennai,India. i was introduced to this girl named priya in start of the year......we started talking and months went by........slowy we started realising that we had tons of stuffy in common....but then these common things went beyond explanation.

Urban legend coincidence

I'm from Penang, Malaysia and I used to attend English tuition in the British Council. Once we were tasked to come up with a magazine in teams, and I decided to contribute an article about horror stories and urban legends in local schools. One school, Chung Ling High School (CLHS), has a particularly notorious reputation for being haunted due to being used as a military base during the Japanese occupation. As I am not from that school, I went about asking others to find out more. One of my teammates is from Chung Ling Independent, which is located next to CLHS. She said that she has heard of an urban legend in CLHS regarding a non-existent class that keeps on appearing on the list of classes and seating plans durig school events. I also contacted a classmate from primary school who was then studying in CLHS to ask for more stories. I mentioned absolutely nothing about the urban legend my friend told me, but one of the stories he told me was stunningly similar to the urban legend my tuition friend said, but more detailed, and he claimed that it is true based on personal experience.

Negative 2017 News Stories

I experienced the following coincidences in 2017: 1. The mayor of Hickory, North Carolina, committed suicide on May 11, 2017. Hickory is my hometown. 2. Otto F. Warmbier, an UVA McIntire School of Commerce student and former North Korea prisoner, died on June 19, 2017. I am a graduate of the UVA McIntire School of Commerce. 3. Heather D. Heyer, a bankruptcy paralegal, was killed on August 12, 2017, during the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was once a bankruptcy paralegal, and I once lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for four years while in college at UVA, including two summers there. 4. A child was killed on August 20, 2017, during a domestic-violence incident in the Baity Hill family housing community at UNC. The Baity Hill family housing community was built after my graduation from UNC law school around the house (Ms. Baity’s old house) where I once lived for two years while in law school. 5. A fatal helicopter crash occurred in Medford, Burlington County, New Jersey, on September 8, 2017. One of the victims in that crash was Troy Gentry, a country musician who lived in the Nashville area (Franklin, Tennessee).

Parallel life incident

I have recently met someone on an online gaming community who shares most of my primary interests including very specific likes and dislikes. Down to having the same personal habits, and small things like favorite color and other preferences. Our birthdays, while 6 months apart, are on the same day, and the same year. We live at opposite ends of the continent and different countries. We even have slightly similar physical features. I am female and the other person is male. Coincidental probably on a very low level, but the odds of finding someone who seemingly shares all those personal habits, likes and dislikes in my own life has been an extremely surprising thing to discover.

Bizarre Bazaar encounter

A few years ago I was on a package holiday with my wife in southern Turkey near the town of Fethiye. We arrived late at night and later the following morning, a Saturday, we set off to walk into Fethiye to get our bearings. It was late March and the first weekend of the tourist season. Shopkeepers in the market were opening up their shops for the first time. They were keen for business. We tried not to look interested as we weren't really ready to do any souvenir shopping. However as we neared the end of running this gauntlet of killim sellers we weakened, hesitated and were soon drawn in to one particular shop. There was nothing special about this one. The owner who we later learned was Mustapha went straight into selling mode, pulling down killims to spread before us from piles which stretched almost to the ceiling. When we insisted that we had just arrived in town that day and were not ready to buy anything he said " I am just practising." We were soon sitting down and his wife served us tea. We got chatting and we said that we were Scottish. Immediately he said "Edinburgh?" and we admitted that was where we lived.

What are the odds?

Before the days of mass mobile phones I was called by a chap named John, who thought that because of my business I may be interested to buy a property he owned about 10 miles away, I was keen to view the property and took his details and arranged a viewing time of 0900 the following Friday. I was self employed at this time and had been shortlisted for a large contract which I had tendered for and was asked to attend a meeting on that Friday morning to finalise the deal. Unfortunately I had mislaid the contact details of John and was not able to inform him that I could not make the viewing on the arranged day, the property was vacant so John would have driven there wasting a whole morning waiting for me to arrive. I was unhappy that I could not contact him to cancel but with the lost scrap of paper containing his phone number there was little I could do. On the Thursday after finishing work I was in the Shower and my wife called up to tell me that a friends estranged wife was on the phone in some distress because she couldn't contact her husband and wondered if I knew where he was? I asked my wife to take her number and I would call her when I got out of the shower.

The case of the matching keys

When I was at university my student flat had the same door key as my parent's house. The two places were thirty miles apart and completely independent of one another but both happened to be my place of residence at the same time. They were both Yale locks and the keys were completely interchangeable. I've always wondered how many combinations of Yale key there are and how much tolerance there is to keys working in locks that they aren't quite correct for. I believe this concept is known as key relevance but my maths isn't up to the job of calculating an actual probability. This web page seems to suggest that for a six pin lock the odds of two people having the same key are 300,000,000 to one but doesn't actually show the calculations: https://www.locksonline.co.uk/community/will-that-be-5-pin-of-6-pin-sir-ask-this-of-your-own-security.html

Encounter in the Sea of Galilee

Some years ago I lived with my wife and family in Israel working as a teacher. We often spent holidays by the Sea of Galilee in the town of Tiberias where we had friends. Tiberias is below sea level and very hot. 35C is fairly common so we spent quite a bit of time in the water keeping cool. On one occasion while swimming with the children I overheard two women talking as they swam nearby. They had southern Irish accents. I am originally from Northern Ireland. We got talking and I discovered that they were Roman Catholic nuns taking time off as they travelled back to Ireland from working in Zambia. I said that the only person I knew who was in Zambia was a priest called Brendan O'Callaghan whom I had met in Belfast and who had kept in contact with. Their immediate response was, "Father Brendan, isn't he a lovely man." They had met him only once as they were working in different parts of the country quite far from each other. A coincidence spanning three continents.

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