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MAA Distinguished Lecture: How to Get Rich Playing the Lottery

By Jordan Ellenberg

Wednesday, June 11, 2014
6:30-7:30 pm
MAA Carriage House

Register now.

Abstract: For five years, a group of MIT students exploited a loophole in the Massachusetts State Lottery to win game after game, eventually pocketing more than $3 million. I'll talk about how they did it, why they got away with it, the mathematical notions of expected value and variance, and the surprising relationship of all this with projective geometry.

Biography: Jordan Ellenberg earned his Ph.D. in math from Harvard in 1998 and is now Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of How Not To Be Wrong, a book about the ubiquity of mathematical thinking in everyday life, forthcoming from the Penguin Press in June 2014. His research specialties are number theory and algebraic geometry; he has held an NSF-CAREER award and was one of the plenary speakers at the 2013 AMS/MAA Joint Meetings. His writing on mathematical topics appears regularly in Slate, and he has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired. He blogs at Quomodocumque and tweets at @JSEllenberg. (Photo credi

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Tuesday, May 20, 2014
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