ABSTRACT
The lottery is a common feature of modern life. Lotteries range from the Irish Sweepstakes, with its yearly large drawings and enormous payoffs, to daily numbers games run by state governments. Elementary probabilistic reasoning tells people that, unless they can predict the future or rig the lottery, a single number that we pick has a 1 in 1000 chance of winning. Since the winning numbers and the payoffs come in pairs, a number and a payoff for each drawing, people can produce a scatterplot of the data to see if there is any relationship between the payoff and the winning number. There are substantially higher payoffs for numbers with a leading zero, meaning fewer people bet on these numbers. Perhaps that reflects people's reluctance to think of numbers with leading zeros. The box in a boxplot contains the middle half of the data; the whiskers extending from the box reach to the most extreme non-outlier; outlying points are plotted individually.
