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 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.”

Return the value of the lowest common ancestor of the nodes identified by p and q.

Example 1
        3
       / \
      5   1
     / \ / \
    6  2 0  8
      / \
     7   4
Inputroot = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 1
Output3
The LCA of nodes 5 and 1 is 3.
Example 2
        3
       / \
      5   1
     / \ / \
    6  2 0  8
      / \
     7   4
Inputroot = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4], p = 5, q = 4
Output5
The LCA of nodes 5 and 4 is 5, since a node can be a descendant of itself according to the LCA definition.

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.

Asked at 21 companies

Practice questions like this out loud in a mock coding interview with a live AI interviewer. First one free.

Your Solution

(Ctrl/Cmd + Enter)

Switching Language

Loading template...

Sign in to save your progress

AI code evaluation

Get a correctness verdict, what to keep, what's wrong, and the complexity of your solution.

Sign in to evaluate