236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Medium LeetCode

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 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

Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 1

Output: 3

Explanation: The LCA of nodes 5 and 1 is 3.

Example 2

Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 4

Output: 5

Explanation: The LCA of nodes 5 and 4 is 5, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

Example 3

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

Output: 1

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 tree

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 root is None or root is q or root is p:
            return root
        left = self.lowestCommonAncestor(root.left, p, q)
        right = self.lowestCommonAncestor(root.right, p, q)
        if left and right:
            return root
        if left:
            return left
        return right

Complexity

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