For seven years, a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploited a loophole in the Massachusetts State Lottery’s Cash WinFall to win game after game, eventually pocketing more than million. Jordan Ellenberg will talk about how they did it, why they got away with it, the mathematical notions of expected value and variance, and the surprising relationship of all this with projective geometry. Ellenberg is the author of the New York Times bestseller How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking and the novel The Grasshopper King. Both books will be available for purchase and signing at the lecture. *Sadly, will not actually help you get rich playing the lottery.