https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8924-5933
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Summary
Lottery winner Dr. Joan Ginther, sometimes called “the luckiest woman on earth,” appeared to be pursuing a deliberate strategy in her lottery wins. Journalist Peter Mucha made a conjecture as to what her strategy might have been, and we analyze his proposal here. Using calculus, we show that the strategy proposed by Mucha is indeed better than the naive strategy. We give formulas showing how much a gambler pursuing this strategy can expect to make.
Acknowledgment
Thank you to Richard Arratia for useful discussions on this topic and to Aaron Abrams and anonymous referees for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The image in is courtesy of flickr user Shoshanah under a CC BY 2.0 license.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Skip Garibaldi
Skip Garibaldi ([email protected], MR ID 622970, ORCID 0000-0001-8924-5933) got interested in the lottery many years ago thanks to insightful questions asked by students in his finite probability class at UCLA. Since then, he left the professor track to work for IDA, a nonprofit corporation, where he currently serves as the director of IDA’s Center for Communications Research in La Jolla, California. He occasionally buys lottery tickets.