Do 'hot' and 'cold' lottery numbers really exist?
"Hot" numbers (drawn often recently) and "cold" numbers (drawn rarely recently) are real in one narrow sense: if you look back at, say, the last 50 draws of a lottery, some numbers genuinely will have come up more than others. With any random process, some short-term unevenness is completely normal and expected — it would actually be suspicious if every number appeared exactly the same number of times.
The mistake is the next step: assuming that history has any influence on what happens next. In a fair lottery, each draw is a fully independent event — the machine, the balls, and the physics involved have no memory of previous draws. A number that hasn't appeared in 40 draws is not "due," and a number that just appeared last week is not "on a streak." Both have exactly the same probability of appearing in the next draw as every other number, every single time. Believing otherwise is a well-documented reasoning error called the gambler's fallacy — the same mistake as thinking a coin is "due" for tails after five heads in a row, when each flip is still a clean 50/50.