Please read the following excerpt from a wonderful book "The jungle of randomness" (by Ivars Peterson) and supply the missing numbers - to the best of your judgement.
In 1986 a New Jersey woman won a million dollar lottery twice in four months. She was extremely lucky, yet the chances of that happening to someone somewhere in the United States are...
your estimate.
You may make your own assumptions, define the population, time etc …
After getting few estimates from the solvers - I will publish the original ending.
Have fun.
(In reply to
My take on it by Charlie)
Charlie:
Your assumption that
40,000,000 people buy 1 ticket per month
40,000,000 buy 4 tickets per month
40,000,000 buy 40 tickets per month.
results in 1,800,000,000 tickets per month.
Assuming a $1 ticket (which is what I think you are implying when you give one chance in 10,000,000), this is $450,000,000 per week. Since any given lottery takes in $10,000,000, this implies 45 $1 million lotteries per week in the US.
Is that what you are in fact assuming? Did I make a mistake? Did you?
By the way, I looked it up, and Americans spend $70 billion per year, a little over 1.3 billion a week, on lottery tickets. But most of this amount are on megabucks and powerball, which have much bigger jackpots than $1,000,000.
Edited on October 19, 2017, 7:23 pm
re: My take on it
