Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings won 74 straight games on the TV game show Jeopardy! in 2004. The unprecedented run earned him $2,522,700, at the time the greatest amount ever won by any contestant on an American game show. Jennings was a software engineer in Salt Lake City when his first Jeopardy! appearance aired on 2 June 2004; by the time of his final appearance on 30 November 2004, he had become a national pop culture hero. He appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and Sesame Street, was featured on television commercials for Federal Express and Cingular Wireless, and helped create Can You Beat Ken?, his own board game. Brainiac, his book about his experiences as a trivia celebrity, is to be published in September of 2006.

Extra credit: Jennings graduated from Brigham Young University in 2000, majoring in computer science and English... Jennings lost to Nancy Zerg in his 75th show on this Final Jeopardy clue: "Most of this firm's 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year." Jennings answered "What is FedEx?", but Zerg had the correct answer of "What is H&R Block?"