A Stanford PhD in Statistics Won the Texas Lottery Four Times - Collecting $20.4 Million

Between 1993 and 2010, Joan R. Ginther won four major Texas lottery prizes totaling $20.4 million. Her first win came in 1993 when she hit the Lotto Texas jackpot for $5.4 million. Thirteen years later, in 2006, she won $2 million on a Holiday Millionaire scratch-off ticket. Two years after that she collected $3 million from a Millions and Millions scratch-off. And in 2010, she won $10 million on a $50 Spectacular scratch-off ticket.

Mathematicians quickly pointed out how extraordinary this was. Nathaniel Rich, writing for Harper's Magazine in a 2011 investigation titled "The Luckiest Woman on Earth," calculated the odds of one person winning four lottery jackpots at approximately 1 in 18 septillion - a number so large it essentially means impossible by random chance alone.

The investigation revealed that Ginther held a PhD in mathematics (with a focus on statistics) from Stanford University. She had grown up in Bishop, Texas, a small town of about 3,000 people, and all four of her winning tickets were purchased in the same area. Three of the four came from the same store.

Experts theorized that Ginther had been exploiting a vulnerability in the Texas scratch-off system. Lottery tickets are distributed in predictable patterns, and information about which games still have unclaimed top prizes is publicly available. Someone with advanced statistical training could potentially narrow down which rolls of tickets were most likely to contain winners and which stores received them.

Ginther never confirmed or denied any of this. She selected the "no publicity" option every time she claimed a prize - a choice Texas law allows. After her fourth win, she reportedly moved to Las Vegas and was never heard from publicly again.

The Texas Lottery Commission investigated and found no evidence of fraud or any rules being broken. If Ginther did crack the system, she did it entirely within the law.