New Books in Mathematics cover image

Jordan Ellenberg, “How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” (Penguin Press, 2014)

New Books in Mathematics

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The Chaos Theory of the Massachusetts Lottery

A bunch of Harvard and MIT grad students beat the cash windfall state lottery. The game had what's called mathematically a positive expected value which in essence means that on average if you play that game on those days and only those days in the long run you were going to win. It wasn't just the MIT kids there were several groups of people who were buying large numbers of tickets in this game up to 200,000 at a time making plenty of money.

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