Lowest Common Ancestor of Deepest Leaves
Problem statement
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 isd, the depth of each of its children isd + 1. - The lowest common ancestor of a set
Sof nodes, is the nodeAwith the largest depth such that every node inSis in the subtree with rootA.
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/
My solution
/**
* Definition for a binary tree node.
* function TreeNode(val, left, right) {
* this.val = (val===undefined ? 0 : val)
* this.left = (left===undefined ? null : left)
* this.right = (right===undefined ? null : right)
* }
*/
/**
* @param {TreeNode} root
* @return {TreeNode}
*/
var lcaDeepestLeaves = function(root) {
const left = getDepth(root.left)
const right = getDepth(root.right)
if (left === right) {
return root
}
if (left > right) {
return lcaDeepestLeaves(root.left)
}
return lcaDeepestLeaves(root.right)
};
function getDepth(node) {
if (!node) {
return 0;
}
const left = getDepth(node.left)
const right = getDepth(node.right)
return 1 + Math.max(left, right)
}