[LeetCode] 235. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree

题目:

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.

答案:

思路：

这道题是让我们在一个二分查找树（BST）中找到其中两个节点的最小（矮）的公共祖先（LCA）。是一道easy题目。

结题思路也比较好想，就是通过和Root比较，看这两个节点是分布在同一侧，还是不同侧，然后递归求解，具体有以下几种情况：

假设我们要求p, q两个节点的LCA，

Case 1：root.val >= min(p.val, q.val) && root.val <= max(p.val, q.val)，这种情况直接返回root；

Case 2：root.val < p.val && root.val < q.val，对左子树递归求解；

Case 3：root.val > max(p, val, q.val)，对右子数递归求解。

参考代码：

/**
 * 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.val <= Math.max(p.val, q.val) && root.val >= Math.min(p.val,q.val))) {
            return root;
        } else if (root.val > Math.max(p.val, q.val)) {
            return lowestCommonAncestor(root.left, p, q);
        } else {
            return lowestCommonAncestor(root.right, p, q);
        }
    }
}