Of all the books in all the libraries in all the world, she picks mine.

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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.

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I was in the Bodleian library being inducted into the cataloguing system, about 15 years ago. The induction was being given by one of the staff and there were about 15 people in the group - people from a wide variety of humanities disciplines including languages, history, philosophy, theology and the Arts. She demonstrated us how she moved through the layers of cataloguing organisation on the computer, down through ''Literature'' through "English literature", and so on through the genres, each time choosing at random the next menu item to click on. Eventually she chose 'Jane Austen', and clicked down and down through the intricate sub-layers to pick on one particular work of criticism. At which point a member of the group piped up in stupefaction, 'I wrote that book!' I want to know whether the probability for this coincidence might be worked out - if you knew the number of books in the library, and the numbers of people being trained in any one day, and other crucial data. A friend of mine who is a mathematician didn't think this was a particularly startling coincidence. But I still think it was. Amazing!
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Date submitted:Mon, 18 Aug 2014 11:05:58 +0000Coincidence ID:7714