The August issue of Harper's magazine contains a fascinating story about a woman named Joan R. Ginther, known in the press as the "luckiest woman in the world."
To earn that appellation, Ginther won the lottery four times. That's right, four times. And she didn't win no measly $20 and $30 payouts either—she hit multimillion-dollar payouts each time.
First, she won $5.4 million; then a decade later, she won $2 million; then two years later $3 million; and finally, in the spring of 2008, she hit a $10 million jackpot.
The odds of this? One in eighteen septillion.
To put this into perspective, the Harper's story's author, Nathaniel Rich, says there are only one septillion stars in the universe, and one septillion grains of sand on Earth. A person with Ginther's kind of luck, writes Rich, would only happen once every quadrillion years.
Meet the ‘luckiest’ woman in the world
