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Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird in their dandy Coincidences, Chaos and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas offer a particularly vivid example.

It's just too eerie to be true, and yet .. :

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960.

Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy. Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839. Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939.

A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland.

A week before Kennedy was shot, he was in . . . well, you get the idea.

Unbelievable! What are the chances? What's going on?

The authors elaborate instructively on the familiar fact that in any group of 45 people, there is a 95 per cent chance that two of them will have the same birthday. They go on to demonstrate that the more data you accumulate on two human subjects, the more is the likelihood of discovering coincident points in their lives. In the case of Presidents, nearly everything they say or do or that happens to them in the course of their lives is duly recorded and amassed somewhere or other. What's more, the computer makes possible more data density than ever, together with the means to manipulate it, with the result that discovery of coincidences abound.

Much of this coincidence mining is for the amusement of those who have too much time on their hands. Too much of it, though in Albert's view serves as a way to feed either a popular paranoia or a hunger for a faith among the susceptible or, in the hands of unscrupulous puppeteers, both. "Are these coincidences what is meant by intelligent design'?" Albert snarls, with, one imagines, Thomas Hobbes whispering in his ear and egging him on. Perhaps you can't fool all of the people all of the time; but what are the odds?

Learn more about this author, Edward Engberg.
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