 Tonight Iowa's news reporter Lucy Yang talking to some math geniuses literally math geniuses to put all this in perspective Here we go. $100 lottery is a game of numbers and chance and probabilities So we asked two math geniuses to analyze the big jackpot Pretty content with my with my life with things I do All the things I care about are very very cheap like math books You may recognize this hulking PhD candidate from the NFL John Urschel played with the Baltimore Ravens today He's flexing his brains instead of his brawn as he works to become a math professor It's not a good investment. It's there as a source of entertainment As a way to support the government and the way to just think about your dreams Princeton professor Mongeau Bargava is working at the National Museum of Math for a year He says a 1.6 billion dollar jackpot is actually not enough Crunch the numbers if the odds of winning are 1 in 300 million if you play two dollars every day for a million years You come out with only one dollar 75 cents after taxes Is it harder to be an NFL player and a mathematician or to win the lottery? I'm not gonna say harder, but I think NFL player and mathematician There's much less of us than lottery winners now if no one wins and the jackpot goes up to two billion dollars Then professor Bargava says the rate of return will actually be worth it if you buy 300 million tickets and if no one else wins on the upper-west side Lucy Yang Channel 7 eye witness news