A brief introduction to the world of q

In 1838 Stern asked the question of how many inversions are in the n! permutations of 1,2,...,n. The second paper to answer this question was written by Olinde Rodrigues. He turned what was a cute but unimportant problem into an important result by a slight extension of the problem, finding the appropriate generating function. A few of the many results which are related to this will be described. Surprisingly, some are easier to derive than their classical versions.