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Very small/classical question.

If you are European fellows you for sure know that the European lottery, named EuroMillions is "offering" today something around €125,000,000.

Damn, that's a pretty nice amount, and for once I realized that I should perhaps give it a try, a simple ticket is only about 2€. But then even for 2€, does it really worth it, or do I have more chance to get struck by lightning ?!

As explained on Wikipedia link, a single grid is composed of 50 "classical" numbers & 11 stars (numbered from 1 to 11). You have to select 5 numbers & 2 stars per grid.

I know this is an old fashion question, but from what I have read here, I would be very interested to hear more about what you, gentlemen, are thinking of this.

Probabilities to become a strike lightning survivor, and/or multimillionaire strike lightning survivor would be some nice to have :)

*Update, after the lottery *: I forgot one value ... the fact that on the lottery day, you can go back home too late to be able to buy a ticket, no matter what's the weather looks like.

And to be honest, the sky was very nice yesterday with no clouds, and no lightning at all, but I was not able to buy a ticket and to play the lottery, so it makes easier the computation of winning chances ;)

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    So what do you want? Statistics on lightning strikes? If so, this is the wrong place to ask.2011-09-07

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According to NOAA, roughly 1 in 600,000 people dies by lightning strike is struck by lightning in the US every year. (Thanks to Steven Stadnicki for pointing out that NOAA doesn't say they all die.) Conveniently, the Wikipedia page you link to computes the odds of winning Euromillions at 1 in 116,531,800 -- about 200 times worse!

Since you probably will feel cheated to come to a math site and not see a computation, the number of ways to choose 5 numbers out of 50 is $\frac{50 \times 49 \times 48 \times 47 \times 46}{5 \times 4 \times 3 \times 2 \times 1}$ and the number of ways to choose $2$ numbers out of $11$ is $\frac{11 \times 10}{2 \times 1}.$ Presumably, the product of these two is 116,531,800.

Even without doing the computation, notice that Euromillions is offering a € 125,000,000 payout for a € 2 fee. So it is safe to assume that the odds of winning Euromillions are less then 1 in 62,500,000. This is an easy way of getting an upper bound on the odds of winning any lottery -- if the bet were in your favor, why would the government be offering it?

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    Your NOAA citation is incorrect, actually - note that they say that the average per capita _strike rate_ is 1 per 600,000, but not every strike is fatal; in fact, guessing from the statistics above that it seems like roughly one in every four lightning strikes is fatal. Not that this substantially changes the comparative statistics, of course, but it's a distinct difference...2011-09-07
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It's a little easier to think about buying a certain number of tickets each year. So let's say you buy one ticket each year (great birthday present!).

Your profile uses a Swiss LinkedIn link, so I'll assume you're living in Switzerland. The population of Switzerland is about 8 million. If only one person were struck by lightning each year in Switzerland, you could naively say your probability of being struck by lightning is $\frac{1}{8,000,000}$. The EuroMillions Wikipedia article says that the odds of winning the jackpot are more like $\frac{1}{116,000,000}$. So you're about 15 times as likely to be struck by lightning!

To get the probability of both winning the jackpot and being struck by lightning, multiply the two individual probabilities together.

This is a simplified calculation: things get a little more complicated if you buy more than one ticket, and I'm assuming that you don't run in around in rainstorms with a tall, iron pole. The calculation of the probability of winning and being struck assumes that the two events are independent, that being struck by lightning doesn't affect your odds of winning the lottery, and vice-versa.

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    @Jay, I guess you are right here, the potential earnings are probably less than what the government & medical bills will cost you afterwards ... so I guess the safer for your bank account and own safety is probably not to play .. but does that still protect you from the lightning ;)2011-09-07