If you've never worked through a derivation/explanation of the Y combinator, definitely find one (there are many across the internet) and work through it until the light bulb goes off. It's pretty incredible, it almost seems like "matter ex nihilo" which shouldn't work, and yet does.

It's one of those facts that tends to blow minds when it's first encountered, I can see why one would name a company after it.

Have you gone through The Little Schemer?

More on topic:

> No comparable primitive has been known for continuous mathematics: computing elementary functions such as sin, cos, sqrt, and log has always required multiple distinct operations.

I was taught that these were all hypergeometric functions. What distinction is being drawn here?