Do You Believe in Magic?

This is not about the album “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful. Although, they did put out a very nice piece of work there.

No, I ask this because I had a surprise comment to one of my posts on Quora. The question was about how much should the questioner charge for a system that guarantees jackpots for the Powerball lottery.

My response (and also the response of several others) was that the questioner should not charge anyone for the system. Instead, we offered the sage advice to use the system himself to win the Powerball jackpots.

That was several years ago that I answered that question. And, quite frankly, I had forgotten about it until yesterday. You see, this lady responded to my answer with a long and detailed comment.

She said she had heard of this Doctor Lucas before, but she never followed up on him. He “casts spells” to divine what the next lottery numbers will be. She had heard of someone who recently had won the Powerball and was given the winning numbers by Dr. Lucas.

So, she emailed him (drlucasspelltemple@gmail.com), and he sent her some numbers to play in the Powerball. She played them and won $57 million dollars. So, she was encouraging me to send Dr. Lucas an email so that I, too, could win a Powerball jackpot.

I am a scientist — a mathematician. I have studied math for a long time now. I have even made contributions in it as detailed in my book Points, Lines, and Conic Sections. For someone to say that magic…