It is very rare to meet anyone who has won a prize worth at least $600 or more in the lottery. (You could expect to buy thousands of scratcher tickets before winning such a prize.) Nonetheless, when looking at publicly-available data, we discovered that some individuals had won hundreds of these big prizes! That much success smelled fishy. We wondered: are they up to something? This talk will describe the data we saw, what mathematics had to say about it, and the legal and illegal schemes that on-the-ground investigations revealed.
This webinar event will be recorded live and made available via ICERM's video archive.
About the Speaker
Skip Garibaldi is Director of the Center for Communications Research, La Jolla, a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit research corporation. His academic research spans many areas, from semisimple linear algebraic groups and their Galois cohomology to probability. He has held academic positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), UCLA, and at Emory University, where he was Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Mathematics. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and has talked about his work on national TV shows such as 20/20 and ABC World News. He has received Emory University's highest teaching award, the Mathematical Association of America's Lester R. Ford Award for exposition, and the Air Force Commander's Public Service Award.
