"To a mathematician, the lottery is a game where those who don't play have essentially the same odds of winning as those who do -- none."
But obviously someone DOES win.
So his math is a little off.
At one level you are right: no one wins without a ticket.
At another level the mathematician is right: YOU will not ever win. I can safely predict that based on the odds of each drawing. I think they have in the neighborhood of 300,000,000 numbers sold for each powerball if I heard correctly.
I would feel fairly safe betting against YOU in separate drawings if only 10 were sold.
Statistically your odds of winning are so remote, they would be IGNORED if it were data sampling in a study.. so he's right.
If Radar paid attention to echos as weak as the chance of you winning the lottery it would be useless... they are ignored, thrown out... effectively non existant.
Lotteries are basically taxes of people who are bad at math... usually the poor.
Tennessee has a great set up... Tax the poor to send the middle class kids to college... way to go po folk... and you wonder why you stay poor?
By about $148 million for a single-payout if someone wins tonight. I know I have next to no chance of winning but I'll spend a buck for a shot at it. Heck, even Hillary can't make money grow THAT fast. :)
enter 1 divided by 100,000,000,000.
What answer do you get?
Yes, but off by an amount so small. . .
Hey, I need a new transit system. Why don't you buy yourself a ticket!
"So his math is a little off."
Your chance of winning is statistically insignificant. I can safely predict that no matter what I do, whether I buy no lotto tickets, one a day, or 100 day, that I will never win the lottery.
Reminds me of card-playing example: Take a deck of cards, shuffle it well and randomly. You can then confidently say that no one has ever, in the history of the world, created a deck of cards in the same order as the one you are holding in your hand. Since the odds of creating a specific order for an entire deck of cards is about 1 in 8 × 10 to the 67th, the odds that ANYONE has EVER shuffled a deck to that exact combination are utterly statistically insignificant. Sort of like me ever winning the lotto.
I don't play the lottery. Never have. Likely never will. However, someone should point out to the mathematician that "essentially" the same odds isn't the same thing as "the same odds." 1 in 1 billion is better odds than 0%, and like you say, somebody *does* win.