Typically, statistically impossible events are often called miracles; for instance, when three classmates meet by coincidence in a different country decades after leaving school, may be considered miraculous. However, a colossal number of events happen every moment on earth; thus extremely unlikely coincidences also happen every moment; Events that are considered impossible are therefore not impossible at all — they are just rare, depending on the number of individual events; It was British mathematician & Cambridge University Professor John Edensor Littlewood who suggested that individuals should statistically expect one-in-a-million events i.e., "miracles" to happen to them at the rate of about one per month. By Littlewood's definition, seemingly miraculous events are in actuality commonplace; The law, framed by Littlewood, was published in his 1986 collection, A Mathematician's Miscellany; seeking among other things to debunk one element of supposed supernatural phenomenology & is related to the more general law of truly large numbers, which states that with a sample size as large as the totality of reality, any outrageous thing is likely to happen