Gardner, Martin
(1971),
"Infinite Regress",
Ch. 22 of Martin Gardner's Sixth Book of Mathematical
Games from Scientific American (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman):
220-229.
Hofstadter, Douglas R.
(1985),
2 chapters on recursion and a preliminary chapter on Lisp,
from Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence
of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books):
Ch. 17: Lisp: Atoms and Lists, pp. 396-409
Ch. 18: Lisp: Lists and Recursion, pp. 410-424
Ch. 19: Lisp: Recursion and Generality, pp. 425-454.
Dewdney, A.K.
(1989),
2 chapters on recursion from
The Turing Omnibus: 61 Excursions in Computer Science
(Rockville, MD: Computer Science Press):
Ch. 21: Recursion: The Sierpinski Curve, pp. 139-146
Ch. 51: Iteration and Recursion: The Towers of Hanoi, pp. 332-336.
Contains humorous definitions and examples of recursion...
...one of which reminded me of the best recursive movie:
Passage to Marseilles (1944), starring Humphrey Bogart
and most of the cast of Casablanca. It begins with a
reporter asking a character (played by Claude Rains)
who the Humphrey Bogart character (Matrac) is. In a flashback,
the Rains character
tells how he met Matrac. Part of his story involves a flashback
of someone
else telling a story, part of which is a flashback of someone else telling a story,
..., until all the stories flash forward (or "unwind", as
computer
scientists say), and we're back in the present.
Odifreddi, Piergiorgio (2007),
"Recursive Functions",
in
Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Summer 2007 Edition).
material is highlighted