Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree
Difficulty: Medium
Category: DSA
Topics: Tree, Depth-First Search, Binary Tree
Asked at: Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, LinkedIn, Apple, Bloomberg, Intuit, Adobe, Google, Uber, Zillow, Palantir Technologies, Atlassian
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.
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**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.
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**Example 3:**
**Input:** root = [1,2], p = 1, q = 2
**Output:** 1
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**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.