Intro to Python for Computer Science and Data Science: Learning to Program with AI, Big Data and The Cloud

11.3 Recursive Factorial Example

Recursive problem-solving approaches have several elements in common. When you call a recursive function to solve a problem, it’s actually capable of solving only the simplest case(s), or base case(s). If you call the function with a base case, it immediately returns a result. If you call the function with a more complex problem, it typically divides the problem into two pieces—one that the function knows how to do and one that it does not know how to do. To make recursion feasible, this latter piece must be a slightly simpler or smaller version of the original problem. Because this new problem resembles the original problem, the function calls a fresh copy of itself to work on the smaller problem—this is referred ...