Skip to content

1218. Lowest Common Ancestor Of Deepest Leaves

Hash Table Tree Depth-First Search Breadth-First Search Binary Tree

Problem - Lowest Common Ancestor Of Deepest Leaves

Medium

Given the root of a binary tree, return the lowest common ancestor of its deepest leaves.

Recall that:

  • The node of a binary tree is a leaf if and only if it has no children
  • The depth of the root of the tree is 0. if the depth of a node is d, the depth of each of its children is d + 1.
  • The lowest common ancestor of a set S of nodes, is the node A with the largest depth such that every node in S is in the subtree with root A.

 

Example 1:

Input: root = [3,5,1,6,2,0,8,null,null,7,4]
Output: [2,7,4]
Explanation: We return the node with value 2, colored in yellow in the diagram.
The nodes coloured in blue are the deepest leaf-nodes of the tree.
Note that nodes 6, 0, and 8 are also leaf nodes, but the depth of them is 2, but the depth of nodes 7 and 4 is 3.

Example 2:

Input: root = [1]
Output: [1]
Explanation: The root is the deepest node in the tree, and it's the lca of itself.

Example 3:

Input: root = [0,1,3,null,2]
Output: [2]
Explanation: The deepest leaf node in the tree is 2, the lca of one node is itself.

 

Constraints:

  • The number of nodes in the tree will be in the range [1, 1000].
  • 0 <= Node.val <= 1000
  • The values of the nodes in the tree are unique.

 

Note: This question is the same as 865: https://leetcode.com/problems/smallest-subtree-with-all-the-deepest-nodes/

Solutions

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
# Definition for a binary tree node.
# class TreeNode:
#     def __init__(self, val=0, left=None, right=None):
#         self.val = val
#         self.left = left
#         self.right = right
class Solution:
    def lcaDeepestLeaves(self, root: Optional[TreeNode]) -> Optional[TreeNode]:
        def dfs(root: Optional[TreeNode]):
            if root is None:
                return None, 0
            l, l_depth = dfs(root.left)
            r, r_depth = dfs(root.right)
            if l_depth > r_depth:
                return l, l_depth + 1
            if l_depth < r_depth:
                return r, r_depth + 1
            return root, l_depth + 1

        return dfs(root)[0]

Submission Stats:

  • Runtime: 0 ms (100.00%)
  • Memory: 19.7 MB (17.18%)