The Roslyn area is home to one of the finest school districts in America. And so, it attracts plenty of top talent to live there. It was only a matter of time before a Roslyn resident made it to Jeopardy!, the nation’s longtime top-ranked quiz show.
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Zach Wissner-Gross is a math education worker from Roslyn Heights. Last Wednesday, March 22, he appeared on that show, facing off against returning champion, Melissa Klapper, a college professor from Merion, PA and Karen Morris, a veterinary student from Christiansburg, VA.
And the man did Roslyn proud. Wissner-Gross came in second, earning a tidy $2,000. The Roslyn Heights resident beat out Karen Morris, who totaled $1,000 in earnings for the half hour of work. Both finished behind Klapper. The returning champ checked in at $16,700 in earnings. That gave Klapper $59, 100 in total earnings for her two-day total. In Thursday, March 23, Klapper’s reign was cut short. For that evening, she came in third with $1,000.
Wissner-Gross is a native of Great Neck, where he attended public schools.
Afterward, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his bachelor’s in Physics and Biology in 2007.
Jeopardy)
From there, Wissner-Gross earned his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from Harvard University in 2012. There, he also completed the Medical Engineering/Medical Physics (MEMP) program at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
Wissner-Gross, as they say, was born to the breed. His father, Sigmund Wissner-Gross is an attorney dealing in business litigations. The contestant’s mother is an author and educational strategist. She has written two books; What Colleges Don’t Tell You and Other Parents Don’t Want You to Know and What High Schools Don’t Tell You.
Currently, Wissner-Gross is a math education worker and leads the development of the math curriculum. He serves as the Vice President of math education at Amplify Education, a pioneer in K-12 education. He joined the Brooklyn-based institution as a product manager in 2015 and commutes there from his home in Roslyn Heights.
As a hobby, Wissner-Gross creates online puzzles and brain games under the profile The Riddler for the website FiveThirtyEight.com.
Prior to joining Amplify Education, Wissner-Gross, in 2012, founded School Yourself, a leading provider of digital math instruction. It creates interactive online lessons for high school and college-level math and science subjects. There, he serves as a Chief Executive Officer and is involved in reinventing online education.
Getting on Jeopardy! is exceedingly difficult. It is a victory in itself. Wissner-Gross is one of the 400-450 contestants go got an opportunity to compete on the show out of 100,000 interested candidates. After a series of tests and interviews, he is getting a chance to participate in America’s favorite quiz show.
Prior to the show, Wissner-Gross shared his excitement on his Twitter post, reminding readers that he was set to compete “on a little show called Jeopardy!”
Wissner-Gross went up against stiff competition. Going into the March 22 show, Klapper was a two-day champion with total winnings of $42,400. She became the March 21 episode champion with a winning score of $24,801.
The iconic quiz show is now in its 39th season in syndication. The half-hour show attracts a weekly audience of over 20 million viewers.
During its incredible run, Jeopardy! has won 43 Emmy Awards, plus a Peabody Award for “celebrating and rewarding knowledge.” On March 22, Wissner-Gross’s knowledge earned him a decent reward.
