# Quote — Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk

> Another lottery mystery that raised many eyebrows occurred in Germany on June 21, 1995. The freak event happened in a lottery called Lotto 6/49, which means that the winning six numbers are drawn from 1 to 49. On the day in question the winning numbers were 15-25-27-30-42-48. The very same sequence had been drawn previously, on December 20, 1986. It was the first time in 3,016 drawings that a winning sequence had been repeated. What were the chances of that? Not as bad as you'd think. When you do the math, the chance of a repeat at some point over the years comes out to around 28 percent.

- Author: [Leonard Mlodinow](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow.md)
- Book: [The Drunkard's Walk](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk.md)
- Page: 65
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonard_Mlodinow#The_Drunkard's_Walk_(2008)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/another-lottery-mystery

## More from this book

> The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large.

p. 99 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/the-law-of-small.md)

> The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/the-fact-that.md)

> It is one of those contradictions of life that although measurement always carries uncertainty, the uncertainty in measurement is rarely discussed.

p. 129 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/it-is-one.md)