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.

/**
* 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) {
int largerVal = p.val > q.val? p.val : q.val;
int smallerVal = p.val == largerVal? q.val:p.val;
return lowestCommonAncestorHelper(root, largerVal, smallerVal);
}

private TreeNode lowestCommonAncestorHelper(TreeNode root, int largerInput, int smallerInput){
if(smallerInput > root.val)
return lowestCommonAncestorHelper(root.right, largerInput, smallerInput);
else if(largerInput < root.val)
return lowestCommonAncestorHelper(root.left, largerInput, smallerInput);
else
return root;
}
}

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