Diameter of Binary Tree

Diameter of Binary Tree is a Easy Data Structures and Algorithms interview problem you can solve, run and submit on Thita.ai. It belongs to the Tree Traversal Patterns (DFS & BFS) pattern, in the Recursive Postorder Traversal subpattern.

Problem statement

Given the root of a binary tree, return the length of the diameter of the tree.

The diameter of a binary tree is the length of the longest path between any two nodes in a tree. This path may or may not pass through the root.

The length of a path between two nodes is represented by the number of edges between them.

Example 1:

Input: root = [1,2,3,4,5] Output: 3 Explanation: 3 is the length of the path [4,2,1,3] or [5,2,1,3].

Example 2:

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

Constraints:

- The number of nodes in the tree is in the range [1, 104].

- -100 <= Node.val <= 100

Topics and companies

Topics: Tree, Depth-First Search, Binary Tree.

Reported in interviews at Facebook, Microsoft, Bloomberg, Amazon, Google, ByteDance, Oracle.

How to practise Diameter of Binary Tree on Thita.ai

Starter code is provided in C, C#, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript and Python. Your solution runs against 5 test cases for this problem, with the AI coach available for a hint when you are stuck rather than a finished answer. The reference solution runs in O(n) time and O(h) space.

Open Diameter of Binary Tree in the code editor, or read the Diameter of Binary Tree editorial for a worked solution with its approach and complexity analysis.

Where Diameter of Binary Tree sits in the DSA pattern sheet

• Tree Traversal Patterns (DFS & BFS) pattern guide
• Recursive Postorder Traversal subpattern
• The full DSA patterns sheet
• All coding practice problems

Problems related to Diameter of Binary Tree

Other problems that use the same Recursive Postorder Traversal and Tree Traversal Patterns (DFS & BFS) techniques:

• All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree — Medium, same subpattern
• Balanced Binary Tree — Easy, same subpattern
• Binary Tree Maximum Path Sum — Hard, same subpattern
• Binary Tree Postorder Traversal — Easy, same subpattern
• Delete Nodes And Return Forest — Medium, same subpattern
• Find Leaves of Binary Tree — Medium, same subpattern