“Extremely improbable events are commonplace,” as the statistician David Hand says in his book The Improbability Principle. In their 1989 paper “ Methods for Studying Coincidences,” the mathematicians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller considered defining a coincidence as “a rare event,” but decided “this includes too much to permit careful study.” Instead, they settled on, “A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.”įrom a purely statistical point of view, these events are random, not meaningfully related, and they shouldn’t be that surprising because they happen all the time. Some might say it’s just because people don’t understand probability.

The question is where this feeling comes from, why we notice certain ways the threads of our lives collide, and ignore others. They have a similar texture, a feeling that the fabric of life has rippled. The overstuffed crate labeled “coincidences” is packed with an amazing variety of experiences, and yet something more than rarity compels us to group them together. Though “What are the odds?” is pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not just something that was unlikely to happen. How much money did he lose? $134, exactly. Was he there on May whatever date I was also there? He was.ĭid he lose the money in line for the Disaster Transport? In fact, he did. With very little attempt at chill I interrupted their conversation and grilled him on the particulars. One evening, as we were sitting around in the common area, chatting and doing homework, I overheard a kid telling his friends how he’d lost a bunch of money last year at Cedar Point. So that was the end of that.Ī little more than a year later, I went to a summer program at Michigan State University, a nerd camp where you take classes like genetics for fun. They were confident we would do nothing to stop them, and they were right. We were hapless, gangly middle schoolers (I was growing out my bangs it was a rough year). They claimed it was theirs it was not theirs-they counted it in front of us and exchanged “Whoa”s and high fives. We had barely had time to whiplash from marveling at our good fortune to guiltily suggesting we should find somewhere to turn it in before a group of older kids ahead of us snatched the cash wad out of our hands.

I don’t remember now exactly how much, but for the purposes of this retelling, let’s say it was $134. We picked it up and counted it it was a very specific amount of money. My friends and I were standing in line for this roller coaster, winding up the dimly lit cement steps, when we turned a corner and came across a huge pile of money. (I imagine it still is.) They had this indoor roller coaster there, called the Disaster Transport. Toward the end of seventh grade, my middle-school band took a trip to Cedar Point, which was pretty much the theme park to which midwestern middle-school bands traveled.

Life happened to me