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Friday, March 29, 2024

On July 27, Kevin Knudson, the UF Honors Program director, wasn’t searching for answers.

He was giving questions.

Knudson, 40, has watched Jeopardy! since it first started in its modern form with host Alex Trebek in 1984. But on Sept. 15, he will watch himself as a competitor.

Because he is under contract with the show, Knudson cannot comment about how he did or what categories were offered during the show’s filming last month, but he did say one of the questions he got right was “Who is Justin Bieber?”

“My wife’s big on pop culture, so I picked that up by osmosis,” he said.

Knudson has a doctorate in mathematics, and this fall he is teaching a one-credit honors course on origami and math.

This was the second time Knudson applied to be on the show. He applied in college for the Jeopardy! College Championship, but he didn’t make it.

This time, he took a 50-question online test and a written test before he played a mock version of the game in Miami.

“The whole thing lasts a couple of hours, and you don’t know anything,” he said. ”You walk away saying, ‘Well, who knows?’”

A month later, a Jeopardy! representative told Knudson he’d be on the show.

From the time he heard to when he flew to Los Angeles, Knudson said he didn’t do anything to prepare.

“You don’t know what the questions are going to be,” he said. “It’s kind of a crap shoot.”

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He said he’s really good at Trivial Pursuit, and he was hoping for a sports category and a mathematics category. He was also terrified of getting an opera category or an Old Testament category. But neither the categories he was scared of nor the categories he hoped for appeared on the show.

“The biggest help was all the video games I played as a kid,” he said. “The hardest part of the game is not the questions. It’s actually timing that signaling device.”

Samaa Kemal, a biochemistry and theater major and president of the UF Honors Ambassadors organization, said she appreciated the fact that her colleague has so many interests, and it shows in the Honors Program.

“He’s trying to make it less of a focus on students who are purely academic,” she said. “He’s making it more oriented to students with a liberal arts background. For us, and me specifically, that’s very exciting.”

Knudson, who said he couldn’t even win his county’s academic quiz bowl competition in high school, said the show is “only really 20 minutes long, so it’s over before you know it.”

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