If I Had a Million Dollars…

The Daily Prompt at the Daily Post @ WordPress for December 28 gave the following hypothetical situation:

You’ve just won $1 billion dollars in the local lottery. You do not have to pay tax on your winnings. How will you spend the money?

I would have written about this sooner, but I’ve been too busy (a) fantasizing about how I’d spend that kind of money, (b) sending emails to the Daily Post telling them that they needn’t be so greedy; a million dollars would be plenty, and (c) sending more emails to the Daily Post telling them that the lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged, that it’s insane to think that such a lottery would have no tax implications, that no lottery has ever had a billion-dollar prize, and that promulgating the possibility of winning such an unlikely sum only gives hope to those who should be putting their money in a savings account instead.

But I digress.

Part of me thinks I’d heed the advice of the Barenaked Ladies…

If I had a million dollars
I’d buy you some art
A Picasso or a Garfunkel

But I’m not sure that a million dollars would be enough to afford a painting by the world’s greatest cubist or to purchase the poet who rode Paul Simon’s coattails to musical fame, so instead I’d commission a mathematical sculpture by Zach Abel. Or maybe I’d just buy binder clips and construct some sculptures myself — at $3.68 per dozen, I could afford enough binder clips to make 746,268 copies of Stressful:

Part of me thinks I’d just withdraw the money in $1 bills from the bank. But how would I get it home? Do you have any idea how much that would weigh? Take some time to figure it out… the result will surprise you. The FAQ at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving might be helpful, as might this picture of a million dollars, although it’s $100 bills, not singles:

And here’s a great problem about $1,000,000, which I learned from Martin Gardner:

On January 1, I deposited $x in a bank account. On January 2, I deposited $y in the same account. Every day thereafter, I deposited an amount equal to the sum of the previous two days’ deposits. On January 20, I deposited exactly $1,000,000. How much did I deposit on January 1?