LeetCode:Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Total Accepted: 46636  Total Submissions: 162074  Difficulty: Medium

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.

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  (E) Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree

思路：

如当前结点是root，如果p,q分别是root的左、右子结点，则返回root;

如p（或q）是q（或p）的祖先结点，则返回p（或q）。

java code:

/**
 * 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 || 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;
        else if(left!=null)
            return left;
        else
            return right;
    }
}