I told my students today that the lottery is a tax on the uneducated. And that I was also thinking about buying a ticket — and that if I won, I probably wasn’t coming back.1

Apparently, nobody won the Powerball lottery on Saturday. Thus, this Wednesday’s drawing will be for an estimated $1.3 billion.2

While at lunch this weekend, me and a half-dozen buddies picked this apart:

What if we pooled our money together and bought EVERY single number combination to pounce on that 1.3 bees?

I did the math — I teach the stuff, after all — and quickly came up with (69 C 5) * 26… which comes out to 292,201,3083 different combinations.4

At $2 a ticket, it would cost just short of $600 mill to buy up every single ticket. Almost sounds like it might be worth it, until two factors foiled our plan:

— the “T” word: TAXES.5
— If anybody else wins the jackpot, you’d have to share it with them.6

There was a third concern, which was so distant a thought, it never came up during our lunchtime discussion:

We don’t have $600 million.7

So much for the dream…

1. To which a student asked, “If you leave, can you give us all 100’s in your class? That way you’re happy, AND we’re happy!” :) [↩]
2. That’s with a “b”… “B” as in “Brian”! [↩]
3. I actually had to double-check that, as for some reason, 1-in-292 million didn’t sound hard enough to me… [↩]
4. We actually debated for a moment if all of the numbers had to chosen in the right order — of which I had to assure them that no, that would make the odds wayyyyy worse. [↩]
5. Strangely, an anagram for “Texas”. By the way, how many people realize that “veto” is an an anagram for “vote”? [↩]
6. As I explained to my students, if I was a rich multi-gazillionaire, I’d be tempted to buy up all 600 million combinations just to screw with people. [↩]
7. Technically $584,402,676… but at that point, who’s counting? [↩]