Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree

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

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).”

        _______6______
       /              \
    ___2__          ___8__
   /      \        /      \
   0      _4       7       9
         /  \
         3   5

For example, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of nodes 2 and 8 is 6. Another example is LCA of nodes 2 and 4 is 2, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

题目解析：

求一棵二叉搜索树的两个任意节点的LCA（最小公共父节点），最小公共父节点就是具有两个节点的最小子树的根节点。

解题方法：

我们用递归方法求解，求左子树和右子树中两个节点的最小公共父节点，如果两个节点分别在左子树以及右子树，那我们最小的公共父节点就是根节点，如果在左子树中找到此最小公共父节点或者在右子树中找到最小公共父节点，直接返回节点就行。

代码如下：

class Solution {
public:
    TreeNode* lowestCommonAncestor(TreeNode* root, TreeNode* p, TreeNode* q) {
        if(!root) return NULL;
        if((root==p)||root==q) return root;
        TreeNode * left=lowestCommonAncestor(root->left,p,q);
        TreeNode *right=lowestCommonAncestor(root->right,p,q);
        if(right&&left) return root;
        return left?left:right;
    }
};