Week 5 SLOG: Recursion

I find recursion to be really fascinating. There are three principles for a recursive function:

1. There must be a base case.
2. The function algorithm must tend towards that base case.
3. The function must call itself.

An example of a recursive function is a function that calculates factorials.

def factorial(n):

    if n == 1:
        return n
    else:
        return n * factorial(n-1)

>>> print(factorial(5))
120

As one can observe in this function, the base case is when n is equal to 1, in which case it will return n, or else it will move towards that base case by multiplying n when it's not 1 with the factorial of n-1.

Recursion looks like it is a staple of computer science and problem solving in general.