Last Week I Learned... Powerball

The current Powerball jackpot is ridiculous! It is now 1.4 billion dollars (USD) and almost certainly will go above that by the time of the next drawing this week. I was thinking about how many individual tickets can be purchased and had to remind myself of some probability rules. With Powerball today, there are 69 white balls from which 5 are selected with no replacement. Then there are 26 red balls from where 1 is selected. The number of combinations of the white balls is (69 * 68 * 67 * 66* 65) divided by 5! because the order of the numbers does not matter (they get listed least to greatest in the end). Then that total is multiplied by 26 to give you 292,201,338 combinations. If someone who had $584,402,676 of disposable income went up to a lottery store and purchased every combination (printed 5 per sheet since you can play in groups of 5 on a single ticket) and a ticket was printed every second, it would take around 677 days to print out all of the combinations. Or I guess if you had 677 machines printing at that rate it could take one day. So I guess this is unlikely. 

In January I'll be traveling to FETC in Orlando, FL, the BETT Show in London, and Educon in Philadelphia, PA. If you are there too please say hello!