Link to Dad

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.

My father had passed away just a few months prior when one evening my husband and I were chatting with an older gentleman at our church in south Texas, someone whom I knew casually by sight, no more. My husband asked him where he was from, and he named a small town in Kansas. The name of the town meant nothing to me, but Kansas certainly did. "My family lived in (small college town), Kansas, until I was eight!" I said. "You're kidding," he said, "that's where I went to college." I looked at him again, trying to guess his age. "You may have known my father; he was a professor there in the 1950s and 1960s," I said. "What was your father's last name?" he asked. So I told him, and his jaw dropped. "(full name) was your father?" "Yes," I said. It turned out that he didn't just know my father-- my father had been his major professor for four years. He had been to my family's house. He had taken a class from my mother. He knew my older siblings as children. But he had never recognized my first name, even though it is distinctive, because he had graduated from college a year before I was born, and he had not known my maiden name. This conversation took place in 2006 at a medium small church in a large city roughly 750 miles away from the small town of my childhood, 46 years after my church acquaintance had graduated from college, and 37 years after my father stopped teaching at that college and my family left that small town forever.
Total votes: 363
Date submitted:Thu, 15 Aug 2019 03:03:38 +0000Coincidence ID:10324