Leetcode #236 Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

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.

     最近公共祖先问题，二叉树形式，递归求解很简单：

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