Quotes & Sayings About Recursion

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. — Stephen Hawking

We live in strange times. We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity of infinite recursion and say things like, 'Oh, hi, Ed! Nice tan. How's Carol?' involves a great deal of filtering skill for which all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the chaos through which they seethe and tumble. — Douglas Adams

You can do anything with stacks and iteration that you can do with recursion. — Steve McConnell

Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension. — Verity Stob

The study of universal grammar is a joint venture between globetrotting theoreticians who worry about impossible grammars and laboratory experimentalists who put young children through these impossible grammars. Perhaps, as in physics, one of these days there will be a grand unified theory of universal grammar. Linguistics today is where physics was in the age of Galileo and Kepler. The collection of principles may one day be replaced by one powerful principle - perhaps just the principle of recursion. that underlies them all. Universal grammar is still waiting for its Newton and Einstein. Whatever it turns out to be, its job its to keep children on the right track to their language. — Charles Yang

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion. — Douglas Hofstadter

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. — Peter Watts

If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is. — Andrew Plotkin

In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they'll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion. — Mark Jason Dominus

I love you," said Bekka.

"I know," I said.

"I know you know," she said. "But I didn't know that you knew I knew you knew. And now I do. — Scott Alexander

Names like clouds. Names like forests. Names like ever unfolding mathematical structures - names that begat themselves, in dreams of recursion. Names that split the world in two. Names that would drive a nail through your sanity. — Alastair Reynolds

Suffering produces a recursion to the tribe, to one's own kind. When a lot of people suffer, tribes lose their head. — Giles Foden

I have an inferiority complex, but it's not a very good one. — Steven Wright

RECURSION [Now rare or oh.s. 16261. A backward movement, return. — William F. Clocksin

This does not mean that I fail to recognise that Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension. It just means that I have no idea how, or indeed if, Lisp handles exceptions. — Verity Stob

A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. ... And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day." "I guess it's one way to look at things," Grant said. "No," Malcolm said. "It's the only way to look at things. At least, the only way that is true to reality. You see, the fractal idea of sameness carries within it an aspect of recursion, a kind of doubling back on itself, which means that events are unpredictable. That they can change suddenly, and without warning. — Michael Crichton

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern. — James Gleick