Trees

•Definition: A tree is a connected undirected graph with no

simple circuits.
•Since a tree cannot have a simple circuit, a tree cannot
contain multiple edges or loops.
•Therefore, any tree must be a simple graph.

•Theorem: An undirected graph is a tree if and only if there

is a unique simple path between any of its vertices.

Applied Discrete Mathematics

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Week 14: Trees
 Trees
• A tree is a collection of nodes
– The collection can be empty
– (recursive definition) If not empty, a tree consists
of a distinguished node r (the root), and zero or
more nonempty subtrees T1, T2, ...., Tk, each of
whose roots are connected by a directed edge
from r
 Some Terminologies

• Child and Parent

– Every node except the root has one parent
– A node can have an zero or more children
• Leaves
– Leaves are nodes with no children
• Sibling
– nodes with same parent
 More Terminologies
• Path
– A sequence of edges
• Length of a path
– number of edges on the path
• Depth of a node
– length of the unique path from the root to that node
• Height of a node
– length of the longest path from that node to a leaf
– all leaves are at height 0
• The height of a tree = the height of the root
= the depth of the deepest leaf
• Ancestor and descendant
– If there is a path from n1 to n2
– n1 is an ancestor of n2, n2 is a descendant of n1
– Proper ancestor and proper descendant
 Trees
•Example: Are the following graphs trees?

No. Yes.

Yes. No.

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 Trees
•Definition: An undirected graph that does not contain
simple circuits and is not necessarily connected is called a
forest.
•In general, we use trees to represent hierarchical
structures.
•We often designate a particular vertex of a tree as the
root. Since there is a unique path from the root to each
vertex of the graph, we direct each edge away from the
root.
•Thus, a tree together with its root produces a directed
graph called a rooted tree.
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Week 14: Trees
 Tree Terminology
•If v is a vertex in a rooted tree other than the root, the
parent of v is the unique vertex u such that there is a
directed edge from u to v.
•When u is the parent of v, v is called the child of u.
•Vertices with the same parent are called siblings.
•The ancestors of a vertex other than the root are the
vertices in the path from the root to this vertex, excluding
the vertex itself and including the root.

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Week 14: Trees
 Tree Terminology
•The descendants of a vertex v are those vertices that have
v as an ancestor.
•A vertex of a tree is called a leaf if it has no children.
•Vertices that have children are called internal vertices.
•If a is a vertex in a tree, then the subtree with a as its root
is the subgraph of the tree consisting of a and its
descendants and all edges incident to these descendants.

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Week 14: Trees
 Tree Terminology

•The level of a vertex v in a rooted tree is the length of the

unique path from the root to this vertex.

•The level of the root is defined to be zero.

•The height of a rooted tree is the maximum of the levels

of vertices.

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Week 14: Trees
 Trees
•Example I: Family tree

James

Christine Bob

Frank Joyce Petra

Applied Discrete Mathematics

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Week 14: Trees
 Trees
•Example II: File system

usr bin temp

bin spool ls

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Week 14: Trees
 Trees
•Example III: Arithmetic expressions

+ -

y z x y

This tree represents the expression (y + z) (x - y).

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Week 14: Trees
 Trees
•Definition: A rooted tree is called an m-ary tree if every
internal vertex has no more than m children.
•The tree is called a full m-ary tree if every internal vertex
has exactly m children.
•An m-ary tree with m = 2 is called a binary tree.
•Theorem: A tree with n vertices has (n – 1) edges.
•Theorem: A full m-ary tree with i internal vertices contains
n = mi + 1 vertices.

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 Trees
• A tree is a loop-free connected graph that
contains no cycles.
• Each pair of vertices of a tree is connected by
a unique simple path.

A Tree Not a tree

 Trees
• A tree with at least two vertices has at least
two vertices of degree 1.
• For every tree <V,E>, #V = 1 + #E.

A Tree Not a tree

 Trees
• Let G=<V,E> be a loop free graph, then the following are
equivalent statements:
• G is a tree
• G is connected and the removal of any edge yields two trees
• G contains no cycles and #V = 1 + #E
• G is connected and #V = 1 + #E
• G has no cycles and adding one edge introduces one cycle
 Example: Expression Trees

• Leaves are operands (constants or variables)

• The internal nodes contain operators
• Will not be a binary tree if some operators are not binary
 Tree Traversal
• Used to print out the data in a tree in a certain
order
• Pre-order traversal
– Print the data at the root
– Recursively print out all data in the left subtree
– Recursively print out all data in the right subtree
 Preorder, Postorder and Inorder
• Preorder traversal
– node, left, right
– prefix expression
• ++a*bc*+*defg
 Preorder, Postorder and Inorder
• Postorder traversal • Inorder traversal
– left, right, node – left, node, right
– postfix expression – infix expression
• abc*+de*f+g*+ • a+b*c+d*e+f*g
Example: Unix Directory Traversal
PreOrder PostOrder
Preorder, Postorder and Inorder
Pseudo Code
 Binary Trees
• A tree in which no node can have more than two children

Generic
binary tree

• The depth of an “average” binary tree is considerably smaller than N,

even though in the worst case, the depth can be as large as N – 1.

Worst-case
binary tree
 Node Struct of Binary Tree
• Possible operations on the Binary Tree ADT
– Parent, left_child, right_child, sibling, root, etc
• Implementation
– Because a binary tree has at most two children,
we can keep direct pointers to them
Convert a Generic Tree to a Binary Tree