And the lucky number is ... 911!

09/12/02 - It's no hoax: the winning numbers drawn in New York's Numbers lottery on Wednesday, 9/11 - the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center - were 9...1...1.

"It's destiny," some observers said of the extraordinary-seeming event. Others used words like "eerie" and "spooky" to describe it.

Significance is in the eye of the beholder.

New York Lottery Website, Sep. 11, 2002

"It's really not that extraordinary," said mathematician David Ross when asked by the New York Post to comment on the winning digits. To quote from Ross's Web page (rather than the Post article, which Ross says bollixed his analysis): "...the probability of a lottery number matching the date in the course of a year was around 3/10, which means roughly once in 3 years" - i.e., the odds against 9-1-1 being drawn on 9/11 weren't exactly astronomical.

"People tend to read into these things," said Christopher Rump, a probability expert at the University of Buffalo. He told the Associated Press he found the lottery results a bit surprising, but not bizarre.

Lottery officials say 5,631 prescient individuals - or were they just lucky? - picked the 9/11 winning sequence.