Lottery
a system by which numbers or symbols are drawn to determine the winners of prizes. Lotteries are popular in many countries and can be used to award money, property, or services. They can be conducted by a government or by private enterprises. In the Old Testament, Moses was instructed to take a census and divide land by lottery, and Roman emperors distributed slaves and goods by lot. In the United States, they played a major role in the financing of roads, libraries, canals, churches, colleges, and other public buildings, especially in the 1740s and 1750s when colonial governments sponsored lotteries to raise funds for the defense of their communities against invasion by British troops and to build Princeton and Columbia universities.
People have a natural impulse to gamble, and the earliest recorded public lottery was organized by Augustus Caesar in Rome for municipal repairs. Today’s state lotteries have evolved in ways that were not anticipated by the politicians who established them, and their operations have become very complicated.
To increase your chances of winning a lottery, Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman recommends not picking numbers that are significant to you or that repeat in groups (such as a birthday or age). Instead, he says, choose numbers with a wide range so that no one else can pick them, and look for a singleton. A group of singletons signals a winning ticket 60-90% of the time. Then check the odds of your numbers winning, and buy a ticket.