NOVEMBER 7, 2016 | LaTina Emerson
Ever wondered about your chances of being attacked by a shark, becoming a millionaire or winning the lottery? Dr. Xiaoyi Min, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Georgia State, calculates the odds of these events and more.
The history of analyzing games of chance and the probability of an event occurring dates back to the 16th century. A more thorough way to define probability mathematically was discovered in the 1930s, says Xiaoyi Min, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Andrei N. Kolmogorov, a 20th century Russian mathematician, is known as the founder of modern probability theory. While Kolmogorov made significant contributions to many areas of pure and applied mathematics, his single greatest achievement was converting ideas of chance and probability into a rigorous mathematical system in the 1930s. Although the probability of some events occurring, such as a shark attack, are actually pretty low, people often think they’re much more common. Min attributes this to bias in the news.
"If you go to the beach and you return safe, it probably won’t be reported,” Min said. “Only a shark attack will be reported. It could also be related to the consequences. Being bitten by a shark has serious consequences — you will be seriously injured or dead. It’s not the chance that matters, but the potential loss that matters. It’s not totally unreasonable that we will be influenced by this.”
Likewise, because people only hear about casino and lottery winners, they envision themselves, too, becoming winners. However, the odds of striking it rich by playing the lottery or casino games aren’t necessarily in their favor, Min said. Even if a person purchases every possible combination for a jackpot lottery drawing, they would still lose money if they’re not the sole winner.
“Most Vegas casino games are based only on chance,” Min said. “You’ll be losing money eventually. If you’re really good at math and combinations, there are strategies you can use for Blackjack and Texas Hold’Em, but you have to be really good.”
Min’s work focuses focuses on identifying the genetic factors associated with some diseases in pre-term birth. “People know from previous studies that some of the risks for diseases are inheritable,” Min said. “If you have a family history of heart attack or cancer, then you or your family have a higher risk of getting a similar disease.
“I do research on something called copy number variation. Essentially, every human being normally has two copies in their genome, one they inherited from their father and one from their mother. Sometimes due to errors in replication, you will have less than two or even no copy of certain gene regions and that might cause problems. People have found that copy number variation is associated with autism and the risk for cancer. If people have more copies in certain regions, they have a higher risk for HIV.”
Min and his collaborators are trying to determine whether copy number variation is associated with the risk of intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH), or bleeding in the brain for pre-term newborns. IVH occurs in 20 percent of premature infants and can lead to developmental disabilities and even death.
“As the statistician, I will essentially find an algorithm to detect copy number variations using the existing data format, and then this could be applied to all different kinds of diseases,” Min said.
What are your odds of:
Getting struck by lightning
The estimated U.S. population of 2014 is 318,000,000. The estimated number of actual injuries and deaths from lightning is 330 So the odds of being struck in a given year is about 1 in 960,000.
Winning the lottery
There are 292,201,338 possible combinations in the Powerball jackpot. So, every set of number one purchases has a 1 in 292,201,338 chance. If one keeps buying one set of numbers for every drawing for 80 years, the chance of winning the jackpot at least one time is about 1 in 35,121.
Shark Attack!
A rough answer could be obtained by dividing the total number of attacks in the U.S.— 52 in 2014 — by the total U.S. population of 318,000,000, making the odds about 1 in 6,115,385. However, the chances are actually quite uneven: The risk only applies to people who go to the seashore to swim or surf.
Playing in the NBA
It depends on a lot of things, mainly height. For someone 7-feet or taller, the chance is 17 percent to make it to the NBA, whereas only 0.07 percent of Americans aged 20-40 between 6’6” and 6’8” in height are in NBA.
Hitting it big at the casino
For those games decided purely by chance such as slot machines, Roulette and Craps, we can find the possible outcomes and their corresponding probabilities, then the chance of winning can be decided by adding up the probabilities of outcomes that lead to a win. But in some games, such as Texas Hold’em and Blackjack, the strategy of the player, as well as the strategies of his/her opponents will affect the chance of winning. Professional players and card counters might have a better chance of winning these games. People, on average, are losing money. Otherwise the casinos couldn’t stay in business.
Making a million
This report shows there were nearly 500,000 new millionaires in the U.S. in 2014, so the chance of being one of them is about 1 in 636.
Becoming an astronaut
NASA has 46 active astronauts and 36 management astronauts as of July 2015. That’s 82 in total, out of the 321,440,000 population, the chance is about 1/3,920,000.
Becoming president
Only people over the age of 35 can run for president, so the population size in this group is 152,567,000. Therefore, the chances of becoming president are 1 in 152,567,000 in one election assuming that everyone has the same chance (which is, of course, a huge assumption).