235. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree

Medium LeetCode

Given a binary search tree (BST), find the lowest common ancestor (LCA) node of two given nodes in the BST.

According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: "The lowest common ancestor is defined between two nodes p and q as the lowest node in T that has both p and q as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself)."

Example 1

q Input: root = [6,2,8,0,4,7,9,null,null,3,5], p = 2, q = 8

Output: 6

Explanation: The LCA of nodes 2 and 8 is 6.

Example 2

Input: root = [6,2,8,0,4,7,9,null,null,3,5], p = 2, q = 4

Output: 2

Explanation: The LCA of nodes 2 and 4 is 2, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

Example 3

Input: root = [2,1], p = 2, q = 1

Output: 2

Constraints

• The number of nodes in the tree is in the range [2, 105]
• -109 <= Node.val <= 109
• All Node.val are unique
• p != q
• p and q will exist in the BST

How to solve the problem

Code

• Recursion

# Definition for a binary tree node.
# class TreeNode:
#     def __init__(self, x):
#         self.val = x
#         self.left = None
#         self.right = None

class Solution:
    def lowestCommonAncestor(self, root: 'TreeNode', p: 'TreeNode', q: 'TreeNode') -> 'TreeNode':
        if p.val < root.val and q.val < root.val: # Because this is a BST, all the nodes smaller then current node are in left subtree.
            return self.lowestCommonAncestor(root.left, p, q)
        if p.val > root.val and q.val > root.val:
            return self.lowestCommonAncestor(root.right, p, q)
        return root

Complexity

• Time complexity: O(n), n == number of nodes
• Space complexity: O(n)