The word Serendipity does not come from Latin or Greek, but rather was created by a British nobleman in the mid 1700s from an ancient Persian fairy tale. The meaning of the word is, ‘good luck’ in finding valuable things unintentionally or by chance, refers to the fairy tale characters who were always making discoveries through chance, i.e. “The tale of the three princes of Seren.” by Horace Walpole. While a coincidence, on the other hand, is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances which have no apparent causal connection with each other. Sydnee Shepherd referred to a coincidence this way; “A coincidence is nothing more then a miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous.” Everybody has experienced coincidences and many have experienced serendipity, as well, without knowing or being aware of the event. However, either occurrence would most likely elicit a surprise expression from the recipient. To demonstrate how common unlikely-seeming events can be, mathematicians like to trot out what is called the birthday problem. The question is how many people need to be in a room before there’s a 50/50 chance that two of them will share the same birthday. The answer they say is 23. That of course means that there is just as great of a chance that there are no two people with the same birthday in that group. We frequently hear somebody voice, “What are the odds?” How likely is it, that that would happen the way that it did? The other night I was watching a young man who had won a ticket to shoot a basketball from the middle of the court blindfolded. He was not a basketball player and not particularly athletic. If he were successful, he would win season tickets or some such fairly valuable prize. After blindfolding him they pointed him in the right direction and he shot from middle court making the basket without touching the rim. Statisticians will try to calculate the likelihood of that for a long time to come. As well, the sponsor of that event will make the next event somewhat more difficult. Because, “Extremely improbable events are commonplace,” In 1974 a moped driver in Bermuda was killed when a taxi ran into him. One year later, that man’s brother was killed while riding the same moped on the same street. He was hit by the same taxi driver who was carrying the same passenger.
I am the great great grandson of John H. Fairbanks, born 1798; he was a somewhat famous fur trader during early to mid eighteen hundreds. He was faithfully married to Sha-gon-aush-equay (English name was Mary Sayer) and they had ten children together. Most of the children married and settled in the Minnesota area. I work at researching my family history and at one time wondered what the chances might be that I would find Fairbanks married to other Fairbanks. Well, to no surprise to me there are literally hundreds of Fairbanks married to Fairbanks in the Minnesota area. True, they are probably not brothers and sisters but many have been very close cousins. When Minnesota became a state in 1858 there were only 6,000 people populating the state. Today there are thousands of related Fairbanks in Minnesota and they all started with John H. Fairbanks and Mary Sayer.
People may say, “What are the odds?” and that’s pretty much the catchphrase of coincidences, a coincidence is not just something that was unlikely to happen. The overstuffed crate labeled “A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection.” From 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. “Extremely improbable events are commonplace,” as the statistician David Hand says in his book The Improbability Principle. But humans generally aren’t great at reasoning objectively about probability as they go about their everyday lives. For one thing, people can be pretty liberal with what they consider coincidences. If you meet someone who shares your birthday, that seems like a fun coincidence, but you might feel the same way if you met someone who shared your mother’s birthday, or your best friend’s. Or if it was the day right before or after yours. So there are several birthdays that a person could or would feel coincidental. And there are lots of people on this planet—more than 7 billion, in fact. According to the Law of Truly Large Numbers, “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen,” Diaconis and Mosteller write. If enough people buy tickets, there will be a Powerball winner. To the person who wins, it’s surprising and miraculous, but the fact that someone won doesn’t surprise the rest of us. Even within the relatively limited sample of your own life, there are all kinds of opportunities for coincidences to happen. When you consider all the people you know and all the places you go and all the places they go, chances are good that you’ll run into someone you know, somewhere, at some point. But it’ll still seem like a coincidence when you do. When something surprising happens, we don’t think about all the times it could have happened, but didn’t. And when we include near-misses as coincidences (you and your friend were in the same place on the same day, just not at the same time), the number of possible coincidences is suddenly way greater. “A coincidence is in the eye of the beholder.” In 1974 a moped driver in Bermuda was killed when a taxi ran into him. One year later, that man’s brother was killed while riding the same moped on the same street. He was hit by the same taxi driver who was carrying the same passenger. Yes, it was an amazing coincidence, but it was merely a coincidence.