There is a great book of stories by Soviet era radio astronomer Iosef Shklovsky called 5 Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon which has a this story (which I tell from memory, no guarantees) In 1953 a young Jewish math
Recursion and state update and Hungarian Mathematicians
Please see this ever modifying page which seeks to demonstrate in a poorly organized, yet humorous manner, what the hell I’m trying to accomplish with this primitive recursive state machine stuff. And as an added bonus – the great “Recursive