Python program to find the power of a number using recursion

Given a number N and power P, the task is to find the power of a number ( i.e. N^P ) using recursion.

Examples: 

Input: N = 2 , P = 3
Output: 8

Input: N = 5 , P = 2
Output: 25

Approach: Below is the idea to solve the above problem:

The idea is to calculate power of a number ‘N’ is to multiply that number ‘P’ times.

Follow the below steps to Implement the idea:

• Create a recursive function with parameters number N and power P.
  • If P = 0 return 1.
  • Else return N times result of the recursive call for N and P-1.

Below is the implementation of the above approach.

Python3

# Python3 code to recursively find
# the power of a number

# Recursive function to find N^P.
def power(N, P):

    # If power is 0 then return 1
    # if condition is true
    # only then it will enter it,
    # otherwise not
    if P == 0:
        return 1

    # Recurrence relation
    return (N*power(N, P-1))


# Driver code
if __name__ == '__main__':
    N = 5
    P = 2

    print(power(N, P))

Output

25

Time Complexity: O(P), For P recursive calls.
Auxiliary Space: O(P), For recursion call stack.

Optimized Approach : 

Calling the recursive function for (n, p) -> (n, p-1) -> (n, p-2) -> … -> (n, 0) taking P recursive calls. In the optimized approach the idea is to
decrease the number of functions from p to log p. 

Let’s see how.

we know that

 if p is even we can write  N ^p  = N ^p/2  * N  ^p/2  = (N ^p/2) ² and 

if p is odd we can wrte N ^p = N * (N ^(p-1)/2  * N ^(p-1)/2) = N * (N ^(p-1)/2) ²

 for example : 2⁴ = 2² * 2²

also, 2⁵ = 2 * (2² * 2²)

From this definaion we can derive this recurrance relation as

if p is even

result = ( func(N, p/2) ) ²

else

result = N * ( func(N, (p-1)/2) ) ²

Below is the implementation of the above approach in python3

Python3

# Python3 code to recursively find
# the power of a number

# Recursive function to find N^P.
def power(N, P):

    # If power is 0 then return 1
    if P == 0:
        return 1

    # Recurrence relation
    if P%2 == 0:
      result = power(N, P//2)
      return result * result
    else :
      result = power(N, (P-1)//2)
      return N * result * result


# Driver code
if __name__ == '__main__':
    N = 5
    P = 2

    print(power(N, P))

Output

25

Time Complexity: O(log P), For log₂P recursive calls.
Auxiliary Space: O(log P), For recursion call stack.