Joan Ginther, a Stanford‑trained statistician, won the Texas lottery four times between 1993 and 2010, collecting around $20.4 million. The first win — $5.4 million on a standard Lotto Texas ticket — looked like pure luck. After that, she treated the lottery like a research project. The next three jackpots came from scratch‑off games: $2 million in 2006, $3 million in 2008 and $10 million in 2010. By then she lived in Las Vegas, but kept flying back to Texas to buy tickets at the same small gas