How to Use recursion in a Sentence

recursion

noun

• Build on the recursion one element at a time, looking for a pattern.
  — Quanta Magazine, 16 May 2019
• For decades, psychologists thought that recursion was a trait of humans alone.
  — Diana Kwon, Scientific American, 2 Nov. 2022
• There is no need for memory to grow or shrink in undefined ways, for recursion, or anything like that.
  — Benj Edwards, Ars Technica, 3 May 2024
• And so on, with each new level of recursion adding intelligence of a kind, and with it, more robustness.
  — Anil Seth, Big Think, 20 Aug. 2025
• Lines of desire and frustration swirl around them in maddening recursion.
  — Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic, 24 Apr. 2018
• One part of the test focused on recursion — the ability to embed phrases within phrases.
  — Steve Nadis, Quanta Magazine, 31 Oct. 2025
• One individual went three layers deep into this sort of recursion.
  — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 9 Feb. 2022
• Informally, recursion involves having an entity or action that refers to, acts on or is based on a copy or type of itself.
  — Quanta Magazine, 17 Apr. 2019
• In a neat bit of recursion, AI is also driving a diversification of chip designs.
  — Will Knight, Wired, 7 Sep. 2021
• Mr Everett claims that recursion is neither necessary nor sufficient for human language.
  — The Economist, 5 Oct. 2017
• Then the authors used a method called recursion to build spaces that multiplied these decision points, forcing the algorithm into a morass of bad options and driving up the cost.
  — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 21 Nov. 2023
• This circular, generative recursion gives us resources, and in fact is likely to compel us, to be different going forward.
  — Matthew Gavin Frank, Harper's Magazine, 6 June 2023
• So far, there’s no convincing evidence that other animals can use recursion in a sophisticated way.
  — Steve Nadis, Wired News, 14 Dec. 2025
• So in addition to programming, Primo also provides an introduction to recursion and the fine art of debugging.
  — Joseph Flaherty, WIRED, 10 Dec. 2013
• One speculation is that animals might use recursion to represent relationships within their social groups.
  — Diana Kwon, Scientific American, 2 Nov. 2022
• Narrow definitions focus on syntax and recursion, structural properties shared by all human languages today.
  — Bridget Alex, Discover Magazine, 5 Nov. 2018
• Daniel Everett, a linguist, claims that Pirahã, an Amazonian language, lacks recursion, and that its speakers do not talk about the distant past or future at all.
  — The Economist, 5 July 2018
• Bonus points for creating organizational glossaries, or eBooks that teach staff the difference between say, zero shot, single shot or many shot prompting, as well as chain of thought and recursion.
  — Clint Boulton, Forbes, 26 Feb. 2025
• Pairing her sensitive voice with a moving piano melody, Zahm recounts years of adults expecting more out of her while her peers kept their distance, and the endless recursion loop of confusion and hurt that came as a result.
  — Stephen Daw, Billboard, 14 July 2023
• Such beliefs are belated, lapsed, overdue, like a book checked out from a library and then lost for decades; the story has moved indoors, the frontier has become one of recursion, quotation, paraphrase, allegory.
  — Jonathan Lethem, The New Yorker, 24 Oct. 2022
• Dynamic programming was developed in the 1950s to solve complex problems using two key techniques based on recursion and memoization.
  — Janakiram Msv, Forbes, 27 Mar. 2022
• So the John in the photo was wearing a shirt featuring John wearing the photo of John wearing that shirt created a recursion that presumably continued for infinity.
  — Clark Collis, EW.com, 17 Oct. 2022
• When the 2020 study on recursive capacities in humans and monkeys was published, some experts remained unconvinced that the monkeys understood recursion.
  — Diana Kwon, Scientific American, 2 Nov. 2022
• The plot’s endless recursions are a reductio ad absurdum of the quest for authorial authenticity, particularly acute in the context of African literature.
  — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 11 Sep. 2023
• Our April Insights puzzle explored the magical concept of recursion, a self-referencing process that can create unending complexity from simple beginnings.
  — Quanta Magazine, 16 May 2019
• Level 2 introduces variables, sensor values, units, flow control statements, arithmetic operations, recursion, and parallelism.
  — Julian Da Silva Gillig, IEEE Spectrum, 23 Nov. 2016
• In a recent study, researchers show that OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model is able to recognize, map out, and even build upon one of the most complex phenomena of human language, a concept called linguistic recursion.
  — IEEE Spectrum, 19 June 2025
• Even in the academy, fellow polymaths were bedazzled by the breadth of his boundless ruminations into metaphysics, modal logic, recursion theory, identity materialism and the ontological nature of numbers.
  — Sam Roberts, New York Times, 21 Sep. 2022
• The second method, introduced in the early 2000s, is called Britto-Cachazo-Feng-Witten (BCFW) recursion.
  — Kevin Hartnett, Quanta Magazine, 6 Oct. 2025
• This elliptical, enigmatic sentence, with its palindromic form (not unlike that of the Heart Sutra), signals the main thrust of Pau’s work, which employs structures of looping, repetition, and recursion to explore the space of ambiguity and uncertainty.
  — Pauline J. Yao, Artforum, 2 May 2026