Recursionism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Recursionism means a variety of things to different people. In recent years, the popularity of fractals has brought certain recursionist notions into the popular discourse. Fractal patterns are also found in physical structures and in economics and engineering.
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[edit] Recursionism in art
It is the use of repeating patterns in modern art (as in the works of M.C. Escher and Salvador Dalí), as also self-similarity in rock art in the old world and on American Indian pottery. Many writers have also explored these ideas in works of fiction, most notably John Barth and David Foster Wallace.
[edit] Recursionism in philosophy
As philosophy, it is an old idea, which can be seen in the works of many thinkers around the world. In Hindu Vedanta philosophy, it is seen most prominently in the Upanishads. There are recursionist strands in the works of Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.
[edit] Recursionism in science
Many scientific hypotheses model certain rates of change as proportional to the variable changing.
Such hypotheses are best expressed in the form of differential equations. For example, if we take N to be the number of atoms present in a quantity of radioactive material, then we can say that the differential of N with respect to N is proportional to N.
This is true, for example, in classical mechanics as well as in the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics. This is also true for living systems where the evolution is modeled by the Fibonacci sequence, for which also the derivative is the same as the series itself. All these represent recursionism at work.
