To clarify the question, would a good distiller be one (or more) of:
a good textbook writer? or state-of-the-art review writer?
a good blog post writer on a particular academic topic?
a good science communicator or teacher, through books, videos, tweets, whatever?
Based on the level of articles in Distill I wouldn’t expect producers of introductory material to fit your definition, but if advanced material counts, I’d nominate Adrian Colyer for Computer Science (I’ll put this in a proper answer with extra names based on your reply).
I’m talking more about the first two. Although probably something in the middle. You can be a good textbook writer by writing clean textbooks, even without much intuition. And you can write good blog post that don’t go deep into the topic. Those two cases are not good distillers for me.
So I think both can qualify, if they are similar to my examples: Tao as a textbook writer who adds a lot of intuition, or Aaronson as a blog post writer who goes deep into technical details.
To clarify the question, would a good distiller be one (or more) of:
a good textbook writer? or state-of-the-art review writer?
a good blog post writer on a particular academic topic?
a good science communicator or teacher, through books, videos, tweets, whatever?
Based on the level of articles in Distill I wouldn’t expect producers of introductory material to fit your definition, but if advanced material counts, I’d nominate Adrian Colyer for Computer Science (I’ll put this in a proper answer with extra names based on your reply).
I’m talking more about the first two. Although probably something in the middle. You can be a good textbook writer by writing clean textbooks, even without much intuition. And you can write good blog post that don’t go deep into the topic. Those two cases are not good distillers for me.
So I think both can qualify, if they are similar to my examples: Tao as a textbook writer who adds a lot of intuition, or Aaronson as a blog post writer who goes deep into technical details.