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236. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Medium

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, 105].
• -109 <= Node.val <= 109
• All Node.val are unique.
• p != q
• p and q will exist in the tree.

Solution

/**
 * Definition for a binary tree node.
 * class TreeNode {
 *     public $val = null;
 *     public $left = null;
 *     public $right = null;
 *     function __construct($value) { $this->val = $value; }
 * }
 */
class Solution {
    /**
     * @param TreeNode $root
     * @param TreeNode $p
     * @param TreeNode $q
     * @return TreeNode
     */
    public function lowestCommonAncestor($root, $p, $q) {
        if ($root == null) {
            return null;
        }
        if ($root->val == $p->val || $root->val == $q->val) {
            return $root;
        }
        $left = $this->lowestCommonAncestor($root->left, $p, $q);
        $right = $this->lowestCommonAncestor($root->right, $p, $q);
        if ($left != null && $right != null) {
            return $root;
        }
        if ($left != null) {
            return $left;
        }
        return $right;
    }
}

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