Using recursion often involves a key insight that makes everything simpler. Often the insight is determining what data exactly we are recursing on - we ask, what is the essential feature of the problem that should change as we call ourselves? In the case of isAJew, the feature is the person in question: At the top level, we are asking about a person; a level deeper, we ask about the person's mother; in the next level, the grandmother; and so on. In our Towers of Hanoi solution, we recurse on the largest disk to be moved. That is, we will write a recursive function that takes as a parameter the disk that is the largest disk in the tower we want to move. Our function will also take three parameters indicating from which peg the tower should be moved (source), to which peg it should go (dest), and the other peg, which we can use temporarily to make this happen (spare). At the top level, we will want to move the entire tower, so we want to move disks 5 and smaller from peg A to peg B. We can break this into three basic steps. Related Recursion :