This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

There's a story in the book, a story about people who took advantage of the law of inevitability to win the lottery.

That's mathematician David Hand talking about his 2014 book The Improbability

Principle, why coincidences, miracles, and rare events happen every day.

The law of inevitability comes into play in lottery drawings.

Some set of numbers will be drawn, so a potential winning combination is inevitable.

The key word being potential,

as nobody has yet won the multi-state Powerball lottery,

which means that the jackpot for the next drawing,

the night of January 13th,

is up to some 1.3 billion dollars.

You could buy a ticket in Hope or as you may have mused you could buy every possible set of numbers to inevitably win.

1992, Virginia State Lottery.

The Virginia State Lottery is a 644 lottery.

You have to choose six numbers out of 44,

which means a one in 7 million chance

that a ticket particular ticket

be the jackpot winning ticket. Seven million so if you if you bought all the

tickets it would only cost you seven million dollars so they waited until the rollover jackpot had

built up to, hadn't been one, so it built up over several weeks to $27 million.

If you manage to spend $7 million and buy all the 7 million tickets, you are guaranteed to hold the jackpot

winning ticket. But there's a lot of organization involved in this. In fact, what happened was

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