{"id":2074,"date":"2007-12-14T08:37:07","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T08:37:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/12\/14\/tree-of-science-4\/"},"modified":"2007-12-14T08:37:07","modified_gmt":"2007-12-14T08:37:07","slug":"tree-of-science-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/12\/14\/tree-of-science-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Tree of SCIENCE!!! #4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s where things on the Tree of SCIENCE!!! start to get more interesting, and somewhat more obscure:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-3f09ecf95ddcb93471385cfa05fafe68-sm_tree.jpg\" alt=\"i-3f09ecf95ddcb93471385cfa05fafe68-sm_tree.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Yes, that&#8217;s a small wooden Christmas tree ornament hanging on our full-size Christmas tree. What&#8217;s this have to do with SCIENCE!!!? Well, obviously, it represents <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Recursion_(computer_science)\">recursion<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>recursion, as you know Bob, is an extremely useful technique in computer programming, whereby you define a function in terms of itself. The classic example of this is the factorial function:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>n! = 1*2*3*&#8230;*(n-1)*(n)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>You can write a program to calculate the factorial of a number by defining a function f(n) that has two possible outputs:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If n=1, it returns f(1)=1.\n<li>If n>2, it returns f(n)=n*f(n-1).\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you spend a few minutes thinking about what this does for a specific number&#8211; 17, say, because it&#8217;s the mystical number&#8211; you can convince yourself that it will, in fact, give you the factorial for any n.<\/p>\n<p>Recursion lets you write extremely short programs to do infinitely complicated tasks, and as such is an invaluable tool for computer programming. And, of course, it&#8217;s almost impossible to do science these days without computers.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, recursion gets a place on the Tree of SCIENCE!!!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s where things on the Tree of SCIENCE!!! start to get more interesting, and somewhat more obscure: Yes, that&#8217;s a small wooden Christmas tree ornament hanging on our full-size Christmas tree. What&#8217;s this have to do with SCIENCE!!!? Well, obviously, it represents recursion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,50,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math","category-pictures","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}