Applications of Recursion

Recursion is applied to problems which can be broken into smaller parts, each part looking similar to the original problem. Some application areas of recursion are listed below:

• Algorithms on trees and sorted lists can be implemented recursively.

• Many problems in computational geometry (and 3D games) can be solved recursively using the binary space partitioning (BSP) trees, fat subdivisions, and other ways of dividing the world into sub-parts.

• Recursion is also useful to guarantee the correctness of an algorithm.

• Recursion is used heavily in Backtracking Algorithm, eg: the Sudoku Solver.

• Recursion is used in several sorting algorithms like Quick Sort, Merge Sort etc.

• Parsers and compilers also use recursion heavily.

• In networking where the model of the wiring topology can be represented as a graph.

References:

1.http://stackoverflow.com/questions/105838/real-world-examples-of-recursion

2. T. H. Cormen, C. E. Leiserson, R. L. Rivest, C. Stein, “Introduction to Algorithms”

3. G.W. Rowe, “Introduction to Data Structure and Algorithms with C and C++”