The Statistics Behind the Lottery

As Australians gear up for the biggest lottery of all time, Dr David Warton of UNSW's School of Mathematics and Statistics has already crunched the numbers, and the results are not as encouraging as most Australians would want them to be.

"The chance of winning from a game of Oz Lotto is about one in 45 million," states Dr Warton.

"To get a sense of how small that it, consider what would happen if I dumped two reams (1000 pages) of A4 paper onto every seat at the Sydney Cricket Ground and asked you to take a guess at which is the one 'winning' page out of the four truckloads of paper that I have scattered all around the SCG.

"What you have there is about a one in 45 million chance of winning -- and an awful mess.

"If I forgot where the winning page was and had to check each page individually to find it, it would probably take me over three years (closer to two years if I worked weekends)."

For more information, please see:

The Daily Telegraph

or

Science@UNSW

Good luck