Language; the index entry recursively references itself ("recursion 86, 139, 141, 182, 202, 269"). Early versions of this joke can be found in Let's talk Lisp by Laurent Siklóssy (published by Prentice Hall PTR on December 1, 1975, with a copyright date of 1976) and in Software Tools by Kernighan and Plauger (published by Addison-Wesley Professional on January 11, 1976). The joke also appears in The UNIX Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike. It did not appear in the first edition of The C Programming Language. The joke is part of the Functional programming folklore and was already widespread in the functional programming community before the publication of the aforementioned books. Another joke is that "To understand recursion, you must understand recursion." In the English-language version of the Google web search engine, when a search for "recursion" is made, the site suggests "Did you mean: recursion." An alternative form is the following, from Andrew Plotkin: "If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is." Recursive acronyms are other examples of recursive humor. PHP, for example, stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor", WINE stands for "WINE Is Not an Emulator" GNU stands for "GNU's not Unix", and SPARQL denotes the "SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language". In mathematics Recursively defined sets Example: the natural numbers The canonical example of a recursively defined set is given by the natural numbers: 0 is in if n is in , then n + 1 is in The set of natural numbers is the smallest set satisfying the previous two properties. In mathematical logic, the Peano axioms (or Peano postulates or Dedekind–Peano axioms), are axioms for the natural numbers presented in the 19th century by the German mathematician Richard Dedekind and by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano. The Peano Axioms define the natural numbers referring to a recursive successor function and addition and multiplication as recursive functions. Example: Proof procedure Another interesting example is the set of all "provable" propositions in an axiomatic system that are defined in terms of a proof procedure which is inductively (or recursively) defined as follows: If a proposition is an axiom, it is a provable proposition. If a proposition can be derived from true reachable propositions by means of inference rules, it is a provable proposition. The