236 Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree – Medium
Problem:
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes in the tree.
According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: “The lowest common ancestor is defined between two nodes v and w as the lowest node in T that has both v and w as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”
_______3______
/ \
___5__ ___1__
/ \ / \
6 _2 0 8
/ \
7 4
For example, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of nodes 5 and 1 is 3. Another example is LCA of nodes 5 and 4 is 5, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.
Thoughts:
This is similar to the earlier problem, find Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree. The different is that now it is not a Binary Search Tree, there is no easy way to tell if a node is in the left subtree or in the right subtree. Now we have to iterate the nodes of the tree to determine if a subtree contains a node. The trick here is how to iterate effectively the tree.
We iterate from root to bottom, if current dealing node is either p or q, then that’s the lowest common ancestor. Otherwise, we continue to try with curr.left and curr.right.
Solutions:
/**
* Definition for a binary tree node.
* public class TreeNode {
* int val;
* TreeNode left;
* TreeNode right;
* TreeNode(int x) { val = x; }
* }
*/
public class Solution {
public TreeNode lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode root, TreeNode p, TreeNode q) {
if (root == null) {
return null;
}
if (root == p || root == q) {
return root;
}
TreeNode left = lowestCommonAncestor(root.left, p, q);
TreeNode right = lowestCommonAncestor(root.right, p, q);
if (left != null && right != null) {
return root;
}
if (left != null) {
return left;
}
else {
return right;
}
}
}