Maths whiz beats huge lotto odds - Times LIVE

An American woman may just be the luckiest person on the planet - she has won the lottery four times.

Joan Ginther's amazing winning streak has netted the 63-year-old $18-million (about R129-million).

Now many are wondering whether she has developed a formula for cracking the big jackpots - she is, after all, a maths whiz with a PhD in statistics from Stanford University.

The Daily Mail reported that Ginther won all the money with the Texas high-stakes scratchcard games.

It said: "Imagine every grain of sand on the planet and then multiply the total by 18. Those are the odds-to-one that Ginther has beaten by winning a multimillion-pound lottery not once, not twice, but four times."

Ginther, who asked the lottery operator to release minimal details about her, reportedly bought three of her winning cards from the same petrol station in the small town of Bishop. Her latest winning card was bought in another small town, Kingsville.

Her first big win came in 1993 when she won $5.4-million. She won $2-million 13 years later - and another $3-million in 2008. Then came the $10-million jackpot in July this year, of which she gets $7.5-million after taxes.

The Daily Mail quoted a Texas Lottery Commission spokesman as saying: "She's obviously been born under a lucky star."

People are also wondering why she keeps returning to the same store to buy her "winning" tickets. The newspaper reported that Ginther had moved to Las Vegas years ago.

A report in Harper's magazine questioned if she may have been in cahoots with the store owner - whom, it said, kept shipments of scratchcards aside for Ginther.

Ginther has refused interview requests. It seems the "Lotto Queen" - as she has been dubbed - is not sharing her secret.