Chapter 12: Recursion

Photo of a seashell showing recursive spiral pattern. — **Figure 12.1** credit: modification of work "Rings from the Ocean", by Sue Corbisez/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Recursion is a powerful programming technique to write solutions compactly. Recursion simplifies programs by calling smaller versions of a given problem that are used to generate the solution to the overall problem.

In advanced programming, some programs are difficult to write without the use of recursion. So recursion is also a style of programming that enables us to simplify programs.

Recursion enables a piece of code, a function, to call the same piece of code, the same function, with different parameters.

Adapted from Introduction to Python Programming by OpenStax (openstax.org), licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Changes were made. License: CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0.