236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Problem

Tags: Tree, Depth-First Search, 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 p and q as the lowest node in T that has both p and q as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself).”

Example 1:

Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 1
Output: 3
Explanation: The LCA of nodes 5 and 1 is 3.

Example 2:

Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 4
Output: 5
Explanation: The LCA of nodes 5 and 4 is 5, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

Example 3:

Input: root = [1,2], p = 1, q = 2
Output: 1

Constraints:

• The number of nodes in the tree is in the range [2, 10^5].
• -10^9 <= Node.val <= 10^9
• All Node.val are unique.
• p != q
• p and q will exist in the tree.

Code

JS

// 236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree (7/5/53466)
// Runtime: 80 ms (85.58%) Memory: 48.28 MB (94.96%) 

/**
 * Definition for a binary tree node.
 * function TreeNode(val) {
 *     this.val = val;
 *     this.left = this.right = null;
 * }
 */
/**
 * @param {TreeNode} root
 * @param {TreeNode} p
 * @param {TreeNode} q
 * @return {TreeNode}
 */
var lowestCommonAncestor = function(root, p, q) {
    if (!root || root == p || root == q) return root;
    
    let left = lowestCommonAncestor(root.left, p, q);
    let right = lowestCommonAncestor(root.right, p, q);
    
    if (left != null && right != null) return root;
    else return left == null ? right : left;
};