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Recursion occurs when the definition of a concept or process depends on a simpler or previous version of itself. [1] Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics and computer science, where a function being defined is applied within its own definition ...
Recursive drawing of a Sierpiński Triangle through turtle graphics. In computer science, recursion is a method of solving a computational problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem. [1] [2] Recursion solves such recursive problems by using functions that call themselves from within their own code ...
Computability theory, also known as recursion theory, is a branch of mathematical logic, computer science, and the theory of computation that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees. The field has since expanded to include the study of generalized computability and definability.
Most recursive definitions have two foundations: a base case (basis) and an inductive clause. The difference between a circular definition and a recursive definition is that a recursive definition must always have base cases, cases that satisfy the definition without being defined in terms of the definition itself, and that all other instances in the inductive clauses must be "smaller" in some ...
Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous functions).
The importance of primitive recursive functions lies in the fact that most computable functions that are studied in number theory (and more generally in mathematics) are primitive recursive. For example, addition and division , the factorial and exponential function , and the function which returns the n th prime are all primitive recursive. [ 1 ]
The leaves of the tree are the base cases of the recursion, the subproblems (of size less than k) that do not recurse. The above example would have a child nodes at each non-leaf node. Each node does an amount of work that corresponds to the size of the subproblem n passed to that instance of the recursive call and given by (). The total amount ...
Recursion is the definition of a function invoking itself. A definition containing itself inside itself, by value, leads to the whole value being of infinite size. Other notations which support recursion natively overcome this by referring to the function definition by name. Lambda calculus cannot express this: all functions are anonymous in ...