I will give a gentle introduction to the combinatorial Rogers–Ramanujan identities. While these identities are over a century old, and have many proofs, the first representation-theoretic proof was given by Lepowsky and Wilson about four decades ago. Now-a-days, these identities are ubiquitous in several areas of mathematics and physics. I will mention how these identities arise from affine Lie algebras and quantum invariants of knots.