Coincidences

Today i was searching for an old joke which i read few months back while chatting with my friend(Sat). I couldnt find it and i was about to give up.The very moment my friend forwarded the same joke to me. That was astounding....wasnt it?

According to wikipedia,a coincidence is a happenstance—a simultaneous collision of two events—that has no special significance and obeys the laws of probability.

"Coincidences" are familiar to all of us. They can involve startling conjunctions of events, such as chance meetings with old friends, or coincidences of personal habits or of anniversaries. Should we be surprised by coincidences?

Think of it this way. There is a great number of events which could possibly occur (N, say) and which might deserve the title "coincidence". Each of these may have a very small probability of occurring in any given week (p, say). Now N is large, and p is small, but the average number of occurrences (i.e., the product Np) may be of reasonable size. It follows "by the laws of chance" that coincidences will definitely occur sooner or later. Indeed, the world would be more surprising if coincidences never occurred.