same name
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.
When I was a graduate student at Stanford University in the mid 1970s, it was still common for schools to publish directories with the names of faculty, staff and students. One day, I idly opened mine and found and undergraduate with a rather uncommon (but familiar to me) name from my home town of New York City, across the country from Palo Alto.
I gave him a call, and the conversation went like this: "Hello, is this Jeffrey Wachtel?" "Yes." "Did you attend Hunter College Elementary School in Manhattan?" "Yes." "Well this is Bruce Reznick and I was your classmate about 10 years ago." "No, sorry, you must have gone to school with the *other* Jeffrey Wachtel from HCES." The two, it turned out, were unrelated and the school, at the time, had no more than 200 students.
[I realize you don't want to use full names, but they're hard to avoid in this case.]
Date submitted:Mon, 18 Aug 2014 12:21:12 +0000Coincidence ID:7715
