“My landlord lives in the basement of our house and every time I visited him to pay the rent, I would see these stacks of graph paper filled with numbers. I asked him about them continually, and he eventually told me what they were—his attempts to predict the winning lottery numbers. He recorded them each day, trying to discover hidden patterns. He claims that one time he actually won MegaMillions but didn’t play his numbers—he was obsessed with the numbers themselves, not money. I couldn’t understand or recognize his or the lottery’s patterns at all, but was fascinated by what they were—evidence of an attempt to understand and predict randomness. In order to simplify them and make the patterns visual, I color-coded them according to my own color systems. I’ve finished 30 so far.”—John O’Connor