"When it came to playing Powerball this month, the odds were not exactly in 26-year-old statistics professor Nick Kapoor’s favor.
The probability of winning with the type of ticket Kapoor bought was roughly one in a million. But he ended up being that lucky one.
The professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut accepted his check for a jaw-dropping $100,000 last week." …
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/statistics-professor-uses-100000-lottery-win-to-teach-students-a-lesson/
What lesson did he teach? Somebody does, indeed, have to win the lottery. The odds are very much against any one specific person. He got incredibly lucky, which is nice. But this doesn’t really serve to teach students anything about probability, other than very improbable events do sometimes happen.
The expected monetary value is negative, so it’s irrational to play if you’re just doing it for the money. I suppose if you don’t really mind the price of a lottery ticket and get a kick out of playing, it could be worth it. But that would be true even if he never won.