He’s Got Lotto’s Number if You Have the Time : Mathematics: Professor’s strategy of picking the least likely numbers will pay off--if you play for 2.3 million years.

Among great minds, the really big questions revolve around the origins of the cosmos, the tension between mind and body, and how to win at Lotto.

Well, a UC Irvine mathematics professor took up the daunting challenge of the latter topic and developed a method that, on average, promises a healthy profit for players of California’s Super Lotto.

In what could be termed the Finkelstein strategy--after its originator Mark Finkelstein--the method concludes that a lottery player who knows the right numbers, and the appropriate time to bet them, could expect a 14% return on money ventured in the state’s game of chance.

Through his yearlong number-crunching research, Finkelstein says he now knows the secrets to a successful lottery investment plan. Not bad considering that the chances of cashing in on the “Super Lotto” jackpot are about 1 in 18 million.

“Oh, it’s definitely valid,” said Finkelstein, whose findings were published this year in Applied Mathematics and Computation, an academic journal.

Of course, don’t quit your day job just yet, Finkelstein said. There is a catch. In order to collect on the strategy, Finkelstein--and the odds--say you would have to play Lotto for the next 2.3 million years.

“Actually, I guess you’d be better off with your money in a CD,” said Finkelstein, who occasionally buys $1 Lotto tickets.

According to Finkelstein’s strategy, a player should only risk his money in the lottery when the jackpot exceeds $18 million--an event that occurs about every 6 1/2 weeks. The reason for playing selectively, Finkelstein said, is that in order to beat the odds, the amount of the potential return must be greater than the odds of winning.

The second key component to the betting strategy is choosing the most infrequently selected Lotto numbers because in the random drawing any six numbers are as likely to win as another six. That way, Finkelstein said, the fewer people with the winning numbers, the fewer with whom you will have to share the jackpot.

“It’s like shopping,” said Finkelstein, the winner of UC Irvine’s undergraduate teaching award in 1993. “You generally want to go during off-hours when you have more choice and less competition.”

After sifting through Lotto numbers used during an 18-month period, Finkelstein confirmed a hypothesis that players favor numbers taken from the calendar. This meant that the numbers 1 through 31 were chosen at a higher rate than others because people associated them with birthdays, anniversaries or other special days.

But it was with some reluctance that Finkelstein released the least chosen numbers. First of all, it took him a year to nail them down. Second, publishing them might upset his betting strategy because other people could now play them.

“It’s self-defeating,” said Finkelstein, who has only won $5 thus far in the lottery. “But why not?”

The least chosen numbers are 50, 46, 49, 48, 43 and 51. (The most frequently chosen numbers are 9, 3, 7, 8, 11 and 6.)

Finkelstein acknowledged that spending a year of research on such a seemingly frivolous topic might seem irrational, especially to the taxpayers of a public university. He said in his defense that it is not the research that is important but the new methodology he employed to reach his findings.

Officials with the state lottery said they aren’t sweating the Finkelstein betting strategy just yet.

“There’s always some kind of computer program and other things out there that claim they can beat the system,” said Norma Minas, a lottery spokeswoman. “But really there’s no way you can do it.”

Although the method may have no practical application now, it may in the future, Finkelstein said. He said Albert Einstein helped develop his theory of relativity by relying upon a formerly impractical math methodology.

“That’s very typical that the math appears to be without application,” Finkelstein said. “Then the use is found later on.”