Recursion
Tautology
When something is defined in terms of itself — a function that calls itself, a story within a story. A powerful pattern in computing, mathematics, and thought.
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Origin
The word derives from Latin recursiō ("running backward, return"), from recurrō ("run back"), first documented in English in 1616. Mathematically, recursion emerged in the 1930s through the work of Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Stephen Kleene, and Emil Post, founding computability theory. Hungarian mathematician Rózsa Péter pioneered recursion theory, while John McCarthy demonstrated in 1960 that recursion could be central to programming by creating LISP.
Updated February 22, 2026