This fall, I’m starting a new chapter as a PhD student at the Booth School of Business. I finished my undergrad in Shanghai — another windy city. Coincidence, perhaps, that I end up here in Chicago, as if the wind insists on pushing a bit for the chapters of my life. Chicago has its grand, confident skyline, but Hyde Park — where I now live — feels like a world of its own. In summer, the streets are lined with lush, green canopies that almost hum with quiet intelligence. ...

Some fun observations when I was opening up Wi-Fi service at my apartment.

Oftentimes, the most beautiful piece is never the most difficult or the flashiest one. Cantabile. Lyrical. Expressive. Jean-Pierre Rampal plays the flute as if he were singing — every phrase shaped like a breath, every note carrying the weight of a spoken word. Camille Saint-Saëns’ Romance, Op. 37 isn’t a technically demanding piece. The notes are simple, the scales predictable, the fingerings familiar. On paper, it looks almost effortless — something any advanced student could easily sight-read. ...

The movie An American in Paris has almost all of its music based on George Gershwin’s compositions and adjustments. Not only in the grand ballet scene or the famous “I got rhythm” dance. It’s a very luxury, abusive application of all Gershwin’s music. For example. where’s a tiny fleeting moments, when Adam Cook (the pianist) playing improvised Jazz, Henri Baurel (a singer) teased him about Jazz’s ‘randomness’ Da da da da da da… that was how you win your scholarship? ...

Classical music are (almost) defined as those scored to be replayed. Jazz, on the other hand, blew this wall open by improvisation. This makes jazz infinitely more adaptable. For example, if you swap the French horn part in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 to Oboe, purists might want to put you on a murder list. But in jazz, rewriting, embellishing, and reinventing are celebrated. A pianist can take a popular jazz standard and spin it into a dazzling, virtuosic variation, and nobody bats an eye. (If you want to dive deeper into what makes a jazz standard, see my post here.) ...

Masterpiece!!!

I’ve listened to enough of Professor Ye’s talks that my Apple Photos automatically organizes pictures of his slides into a “memory” album (by recognizing Prof Ye of course). Interestingly delightful — I always learn so much from them! Professor Ye: Slay. Another refreshing piece of research on applying OR to game theory: The Implicit Barrier of Utility Maximization: An Interior-Point Approach for Market Equilibria Chuwen Zhang, Chang He, Bo Jiang, Yinyu Ye | ArXiv link ...

I’m not a LaTeX expert, but after a few papers and too many deadlines, here’s the system I’ve been using to stay sane, and stay synced. TeX was created by Donald Knuth, the legendary computer scientist, while writing the legendary The Art of Computer Programming (He wasn’t happy with the typesetting quality, so he built TeX in 1978). The beauty is that LaTeX’s elegance lies in its logic + automation — like once the stage is set up, the rest is “the creation of beautiful books”. So it’s definitely worth the investment to set it up and manage it well. ...

Two years! Ariana’s Blog quietly turns another page today. Another anniversary, another orbit around this little sun of words. Small but meaningful changes have crept in. I’ve been trying to write more independently, to keep AI assistance at some distance except grammar debugs. There’s a certain procrastination settling in — perhaps next year I’ll shake it off a bit. My taste in classical music has evolved, too — reshaped by evenings spent in concert halls instead of restaurants, my shopping and dining budgets willingly surrendered to (a lot of) Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Chopin. ...

What a joy it is to stumble upon a seminal paper—then realizing it’s by someone you’ll get to know in the future. Moments like these make research feel like a small, interconnected world: The Combinatorial Assignment Problem: Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes Eric Budish link This paper proposes a new mechanism for combinatorial assignment—for example, assigning schedules of courses to students—based on an approximation to competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (CEEI) in which incomes are unequal but arbitrarily close together. The main technical result is an existence theorem for approximate CEEI. The mechanism is approximately efficient, satisfies two new criteria of outcome fairness, and is strategyproof in large markets. Its performance is explored on real data, and it is compared to alternatives from theory and practice: all other known mechanisms are either unfair ex post or manipulable even in large markets, and most are both manipulable and unfair. ...