A recursive step — a set of rules that reduces all successive cases toward the base case. For example, the following is a recursive definition of a person's ancestor.
Illustrated definition of Recursive: Applying a rule or formula to its own result, again and again. Example: start with 1 and apply double recursively:...
Both place emphasis on breaking the problem down into smaller parts and solving the problem one step at a time, but the key difference is that recursive functions are usually partly defined by themselves.
In computer science, recursion is a method of solving a computational problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem. [1][2] Recursion solves such recursive problems by using functions that call themselves from within their own code.