Solving Recurrences

A recurrence is a recursive description of a function, usually of the form F : IN→ IR, or a description of such a function in terms of itself. Like all recursive structures, a recurrence consists of one or more base cases and one or more recursive cases. Each of these cases is an equation or inequality, with some function value f (n) on the left side. The base cases give explicit values for a (typically finite, typically small) subset of the possible values of n. The recursive cases relate the function value f (n) to function value f (k) for one or more integers k < n; typically, each recursive case applies to an infinite number of possible values of n. For example, the following recurrence (written in two different but standard ways) describes the identity function f (n) = n: