What started as a research project in 1996, went up for sale for $1m in 1999 and officially entered into the English language as a verb in 2006?
You could search online for the answer, in which case it’s probably already staring right at you: Google. The internet behemoth was famously offered for sale to the CEO of rival ‘Excite’, George Bell, for $1m when co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were finding the search engine taking up too much time from their research. Unfortunately for Bell, he turned them down, and Excite itself was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2004.
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It’s estimated that around 10,000 people a week choose 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 as their lottery numbers.
This despite the odds that any 6 numbers being drawn are exactly the same as any other combination. If they ever come up (there are 13,983,816 possible combinations of six numbers from 49 numbers so the lottery odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816), chances are you’ll be disappointed with having to share your loot with so many others.
Oxford professor of mathematics, Marcus Du Sautoy, says: ‘My advice is to pick consecutive numbers, like 31, 32, 33. Not many people do, but it is just as likely as any other combination.’
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