 Hi everyone it's MJ and welcome to this introductory video on the course of generating functions. Now we know the whole idea of statistics is that we have some data and we want to find information on the parameters and distribution of the random variable thing that generated the data so we can answer questions and optimize processes. Now in order to get from data to information we have to do a little bit of stats and stats is the processing and processing that's where the mathematics comes in and one of the most interesting forms of mathematics is this thing called generating functions. Now this trips up a lot of students because they try to think where on earth did this come from what is the logic behind it you know where do they just where do they come from and for many of the times people don't really know I mean it was kind of the same statistician who came up with the central limit theorem was the guy who first started introducing generating functions and from a understanding point of view they are very very difficult to comprehend. The good news though the good news is that they're much easier to use than calculus and this is going to help us a lot so the maths doing the maths is quite easy figuring out where it came from is tricky so if you just decide to say okay I'm putting that aside I'm going to just focus on using generating functions and not worrying where they come from you are going to find this course to be mind-opening because suddenly we are going to be able to manipulate distributions it's going to help us find parameters and it's just like I said it's much easier than using calculus and this is critical when it comes to say finding the skewness because before the calculus to do that was intense moment generating functions cumulative generating functions can do this almost in one line and this becomes very important when we start extending random variables later to compound or multidimensional or joint or expectational and all of those type of things we're going to see that the generating functions allows us to handle the maths in a much more eloquent way than calculus and integration and all of that type of stuff so the big big secret for this course is not to try and figure out how did we come up with generating functions the whole secret of this course is to figure out how to use generating functions in the whole big scheme of stats anyway I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I'll see you for the rest of the course