A NASA rocket scientist won the Virginia Lottery. This is how she picked her numbers

An honest to goodness rocket scientist won $1 million in the Virginia Lottery

Norma Farr of Newport News “rocketed” to millionaire status via the Mega Millions game, state officials said in a news release.

Farr has been a lab leader at the NASA Langley Research Center for 35 years, according to her LinkedIn profile.

She bought her Mega Millions ticket online, and her approach to picking her numbers is not what you might expect from someone with degrees in mathematics and computer science.

Formulas and calculations are no use when it comes to a random lottery, so Farr let the lottery computer pick her numbers, officials said.

It worked. The winning numbers in the drawing were 41-43-51-57-70 and Farr fell just one digit short of getting a multi-million dollar jackpot. “The only number she failed to match was the Mega Ball number, which was 1,” the state lottery said.

Farr beats odds of 1 in 12,607,306 to win $1 million. Odds of matching all six numbers are 1 in 302,575,350, which is astronomical.

Her reaction might be called subdued. “I checked the numbers, and I told my boyfriend, ‘I think I won a lot of money!’” Farr later told lottery officials.

She is still pondering how to spend $1 million but “may splurge and buy a Jeep,” officials said.

The fact Farr trusted the computer to pick her numbers may be related to her job. A NASA Research News profile of Farr said she and her team work with “Computer-Aided Design (CAD) geometry, whether that is to support Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the creation of test articles or the development of CAD from measured data.”

Mega Millions drawings are held twice a week, Tuesday and Friday, and the top prize changes “dependent on the amount of money in the draw’s prize pool,” according to the website.

The jackpot for the next drawing is $36 million, or about $25 million after withholdings, the site reports.

This story was originally published November 3, 2021 at 9:12 AM with the headline "A NASA rocket scientist won the Virginia Lottery. This is how she picked her numbers."