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Abstract
The Mega Millions Lottery is a game of chance, no skill possible. It’s played in most states and offers multi-million-dollar jackpots. Despite various popular lottery “strategies,” like lucky numbers, birthdays, anniversaries, astrology, studying past results, and so on, there is no skill in buying lottery tickets. This is because lottery winners are determined by picking numbers at random. If you think that the configuration of the planets or a pattern you saw in your oatmeal this morning has any effect on your chance of winning, then maybe you have apophenia, the tendency to perceive a connection between unrelated or random things. The chance of winning the jackpot is so low that if you buy a ticket, you will almost certainly lose. This doesn’t mean that everybody will lose. We will look at lottery results in the context of hypothesis testing and p-values.
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Michael Orkin
Mike Orkin holds a BA in mathematics and a PhD in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a math professor at Berkeley Community College in Berkeley, California, where he specializes in teaching statistics online. He is also professor of statistics emeritus at California State University East Bay, where he was chair of the statistics department for 14 years. Orkin has done considerable consulting for both the government and private sectors. He has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events and was a speaker in the Google Tech Talk series. He has published numerous research papers on statistics and game theory. He is the author of several books, including What Are the Odds? Chance in Everyday Life and Can You Win? The Real Odds for Casino Gambling, Sports Betting, and Lotteries.