Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

by Matt Parker

There are people online trying to sell their secrets to winning the lottery. Much of the pseudoscience around lottery draws tries to cloak itself as being mathematical and is normally a variation on the gambler’s fallacy. This logical fallacy is that, if some random event has not happened for a while, then it is “due.” But if events are truly random and independent, then an outcome cannot be more or less likely based on what has come before it. Yet people track which numbers have not come up in the lottery recently to see which ones are due an appearance. This reached fever pitch in Italy in 2005 when the number 53 had not been seen for a very long time. The Italian lottery in 2005 was a bit different from those in other countries: it had ten different draws (named after different cities), in each of which participants chose five numbers from a possible ninety. Unusually, players didn’t have to choose a complete set of numbers. They could opt to bet on a single number coming out of a certain draw. And the number 53 had not come out of the Venice draw for nearly two years. Loads of people felt that the Venice 53 ball was due. At least €3.5 billion was spent buying tickets with the number 53; that’s €227 per family in Italy. People were borrowing money to place bets as 53 continued not to get drawn and so was, apparently, more and more overdue. Those with a system kept increasing their stake each week so when 53 finally arrived they would recoup all previous losses. Players ...