Profiles of Rising Stars
Steve Mitnick is President of Lines Up, Inc., Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly, author of “Lines Down: How We Pay, Use, Value Grid Electricity Amid the Storm.”
What's the first whole number that's both a perfect square and a perfect cube? Why, it's 64, equal to 8 times 8 and 4 times 4 times 4 as well.
64 is the number of squares on a chess board, and also a Nintendo standard, as in Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64. It's the maximum number of strokes in any Chinese character (wow), and in the song about old age on the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The 64-bit register in computing can hold a whole lot of numbers, greater than 18 quintillion different values, or more precisely, 2 to the 64th power of them. The ASCII code 64 is the extremely useful symbol, @.
And, 64 is how many rising stars of our industry — each nominated for Fortnightly Under Forty 2020 — that we're celebrating in this year's feature on our next generation.
These 64 rising stars hail from twenty-seven different industry organizations. They're from ten investor-owned utilities, two public power utilities, two rural electric cooperatives, three associations of utilities, two technology groups, three vendors, four professional firms, and a state utility commission.