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Chapter 5: Mathematical Induction

Chapter 5: Mathematical Induction

pp. 215-266

Authors

, Carleton College, Minnesota
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Summary

Recursion is a powerful technique in computer science. If wecan express a solution to problem X in terms of solutionsto smaller instances of the same problem X—and wecan solve X directly for the “smallest”inputs—then we can solve X for all inputs. There aremany examples. We can sort an array A by sorting the lefthalf of A and the right half of A andmerging the results together; 1-element arrays are by definition alreadysorted. (That’s merge sort.)

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