MATH Seminar

Title: Some People Have All The Luck
Type: N/A
Speaker: Skip Garibaldi / Lawrence Mower of Emory and UCLA / Palm Beach Post
Contact: David Zureick-Brown, dzb@mathcs.emory.edu
Date: 2014-04-02 at 6:00PM
Venue: MSC E208
Download Flyer
Abstract:
Winning a prize of at least $600 in the lottery is a remarkable thing — for a typical scratcher ticket the odds are worse than 1-in-1200 and 1-in-9000 is a more typical figure. Some people have won several of these large prizes, and clearly they are very lucky or they buy a ton of lottery tickets. When we investigated records of all claimed lottery prizes, we discovered that some people had won hundreds of these prizes! Such people seem to be not just lucky, but suspiciously lucky. We will explain what we thought they might have been up to, what mathematics says about it, and what further investigations revealed. This talk is about joint work with Philip B. Stark. Skip Garibaldi is associate director of UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and a professor in Emory University's Department of Mathematics & Computer Science. His previous work on the lottery received the Lester R. Ford Award and is the subject of a chapter in the popular book “Brain Trust". Millions of people have seen him talk about math on 20/20, CNN, and Fox & Friends, and he is featured in a museum exhibit about mathematics currently on display at Exploration Place in Wichita. Lawrence Mower is an investigative reporter with The Palm Beach Post. He joined The Post in 2013, after working for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, where his yearlong investigation into Las Vegas police shootings sparked a Department of Justice investigation and led to reforms in policy and oversight. The five-part series was awarded by the National Headliner Awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the ACLU of Nevada, and in 2012 he was named Nevada's Outstanding Journalist by the Nevada Press Association. He is a 2006 graduate of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
See All Seminars