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Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns in C#

Solution: Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Explore how to determine the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree by applying depth-first search. Understand the recursive strategy that identifies whether nodes are descendants of each other or their common ancestor. Learn to implement this in C# with attention to runtime and space complexities.

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Statement

Given the root node of a binary tree with nn nodes, your task is to find the lowest common ancestor of two of its nodes, p and q.

Note: The lowest common ancestor of two nodes, p and q, is defined as the lowest node in the binary tree that has both p and q as descendants.

A node can also be a descendant of itself. For example, if q is a descendant of p, and we know that p is a descendant of itself, then p will be the lowest common ancestor of p and q.

Constraints:

  • 2≤n≤5002 \leq n \leq 500
  • All Node.data are unique.
  • p
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