Even though I’ve been teaching R and statistical programming since 2017, and despite the fact that I do all sorts of heavily quantitative research, I’m really really bad at probability math . Like super bad. The last time I truly had to do set theory and probability math was in my first PhD-level stats class in 2012.

Fans of probability love random processes. And lotteries are a great example of random number generation. The UK National Lottery ran in one format from 19/11/1994 until 7/10/2015. I was talking to somebody who had played the same set of numbers in all of these lottery draws and I wondered what the net gain or loss has been for them over this period.