- Difficulty: Medium
- Tags: LeetCode, Medium, Tree, Depth-First Search, Binary Tree, leetcode-1644, O(n), O(h), 🔒, DFS, Stack
Problem
Given the root
of a binary tree, return the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two given nodes, p
and q
. If either node p
or q
does not exist in the tree, return null
. All values of the nodes in the tree are unique.
According to the definition of LCA on Wikipedia: "The lowest common ancestor of two nodes p
and q
in a binary tree T
is the lowest node that has both p
and q
as descendants (where we allow a node to be a descendant of itself)". A descendant of a node x
is a node y
that is on the path from node x
to some leaf node.
Â
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. A node can be a descendant of itself according to the definition of LCA.
Example 3:
Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 10 Output: null Explanation: Node 10 does not exist in the tree, so return null.
Â
Constraints:
- The number of nodes in the tree is in the range
[1, 104]
. -109 <= Node.val <= 109
- All
Node.val
are unique. p != q
Â
Follow up:Â Can you find the LCA traversing the tree, without checking nodes existence?