What is a recursive function?

- [Instructor] Recursion means … defining something in terms of itself … to achieve your objective. … Recursion can take place in programming. … A function is called recursive … if the body of the function calls the function itself. … In other words, … the process of executing the body of a recursive function … may in turn require applying that function again. … A recursive function solves a problem … by dividing the problem into smaller subproblems … and calling the function itself to solve each subproblem. … Python supports recursion. … For example, say you want to write a function … that takes a positive integer as input … and returns the factorial of that number. … Note that in math, … the factorial of a positive integer N, … denoted by N factorial, … is the product of all positive integers … less than or equal to N. … So the factorial of one is one, … the factorial of two is two times one, … the factorial of three is three times two times one, … the factorial of four … is four times three times two times one, and so on. …