recursion

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The act of recurring.

   “The inhabitants predicate the recursion of these storms by numerous other signs, and are prompt to take every precaution to avoid their effects.”

2. (countable, uncountable)The act of defining an object (usually a function) in terms of that object itself.

   “n! = n × (n − 1)! (for n > 0) or 1 (for n = 0) defines the factorial function using recursion.”

   “However, we have still not achieved our goal of devising a finite set of rules which will generate an infinite set of sentence structures. In order to achieve this goal, we need to allow for the fact that natural languages typically have the property that they allow potentially infinite recursion of particular structures.”

3. (countable, uncountable)The invocation of a procedure from within itself.

   “This function uses recursion to compute factorials.”

   “When an algorithm makes two recursive calls, we say that it uses binary recursion.”