Washington and Lee University mathematics professor Aaron Abrams has a challenge for you.
An alarm will go off sometime in the next nine years. It will last one second. Predict the year, month, day, minute and second it will happen.
As there are about 292 million seconds in nine years, the odds of guessing the second correctly are about the same as winning the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot Wednesday night, he said. If that’s too hard, try picking the correct blade of grass in a soccer field.
Winning the lottery is near impossible, but that hasn’t stopped millions of Americans from buying their chance at a dream.
Sales between Jan. 6 and the Jan. 9 drawing, in which the prize rolled for the 19th time, reached almost $930 million. Lottery officials said players bought 75 percent of all possible number combinations before Saturday night’s drawing, but nobody guessed the ones picked that night: 16, 19, 32, 34, 57 and the Powerball number 13. Lottery officials expect the jackpot will grow before Wednesday night.
How hard is it to win? Loyola Marymount University Mathematics professor Curtis Bennett said to imagine a 181-mile-long stack of 292 million $1 dollar bills — the distance from Chicago to Decatur, Ill. — with one $1,000 bill tucked inside. The likelihood of winning the Powerball is the same as choosing the hidden $1,000 bill.
A person also has the same chance of picking a single lucky poker chip from a 613-mile-high stack.
Abrams said the lottery is not a good bet in most cases, especially in big multistate games like Powerball. Players should see the game as entertainment, not as a way to get rich quick.
“It is unlikely that you or I are going to win, but it is likely somebody will,” he said.
If you’re a numbers person, there is an objective way to compute whether you should consider buying a ticket, mathematicians say.
When standing at the convenience store counter, you could consider the expected value. To do that, take all possible outcomes, multiply them by their probability and add the numbers up. If the expected value is lower than your initial investment — a $2 lottery ticket — perhaps it’s time to reconsider.
Clearly that’s not mental math, but Paul Jung, a mathematics professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham, already has done the calculations. He estimates the expected value of a Powerball lottery ticket after taxes is between $0.70 and $0.90.
Jung said if you pay $2 for a Powerball ticket and expect to get $0.80 back, it’s not a good return.
Worse still, once enough tickets are sold, the probability that the jackpot is split two or more ways is greater than the probability that there is a single winner, Bennett said. If 500 million tickets are sold, there is roughly an 80 percent chance someone will win the lottery. But there is also about a 50 percent chance at least two winning tickets have been sold.
Then there are the taxes.
Bennett’s son, against his father’s advice, plays the lottery. But he’s in it for the fun. He has the two or three days before the numbers are called to imagine an unattainable life. Bennett guesses his son gets the same enjoyment from playing the lottery 10 times as many others do going to the movies once for the same price.
“If you’re someone who likes to fantasize, you can fantasize for a few days,” he said. “Ask, ‘Is it worth the two dollars to have a good time?'”
To be sure, $1.5 billion is a lot of money. If the point is pure fantasy, and we’re not considering taxes and other complications, imagine what could be done with it.
That much money could buy:
—Dinner for you and 1,685,392 friends at Alinea in Lincoln Park. At $445 for a table for two, Alinea (currently closed for renovations) is Chicago’s most expensive restaurant.
—134,589 bars of gold. That’s about 3.7 million pounds of gold.
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—Four F-22 Raptor fighter jets.
—88 Trump Tower penthouses. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-confidential-trump-tower-sale-1209-biz-20141208-column.html
—The flying car from “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”; James Bond’s Lotus submarine car from “The Spy Who Loved Me”; Marilyn Monroe’s famous white dress from “The Seven Year Itch”; the Cowardly Lion costume and ruby-red slippers from “The Wizard of Oz”; the DeLorean DMC-12 time machine from “Back to the Future”; and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. Oh, and you’d have more than $1.4 billion left.
—476,341 2016 Gibson Les Paul guitars.
—49,636,002 barrels of crude oil, which is now $30.22 a barrel, according to NASDAQ.
Twitter @MatthewMcCall_