A Mathematician Breaks Down the Odds of a Seemingly Impossible Coincidence

Mathematician and author Joseph Mazur breaks down the odds of a seemingly impossible coincidence in an insightful interview with Vox contributor Phil Edwards. Edwards explains the story of Anne Parish, a woman from Colorado Springs who found the exact copy of a book she owned as a child while on a trip to Paris.

On its surface, Parish’s story sounds like it involves an inconceivable level of chance, but Mazur dug deeper in his book Fluke: The Math & Myth of Coincidence and calculated the actual odds.