Minimum Depth of Binary Tree

Given a binary tree, find its minimum depth.

The minimum depth is the number of nodes along the shortest path from the root node down to the nearest leaf node.

Note: A leaf is a node with no children.

Example 1:

Input: root = [3,9,20,null,null,15,7]
Output: 2

Example 2:

Input: root = [2,null,3,null,4,null,5,null,6]
Output: 5

Constraints:

• The number of nodes in the tree is in the range [0, 105].
• -1000 <= Node.val <= 1000

SOLUTION:

# 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 minDepth(self, root: Optional[TreeNode]) -> int:
        if root:
            a = self.minDepth(root.left)
            b = self.minDepth(root.right)
            if a == 0 or b == 0:
                return a + b + 1
            return 1 + min(a, b)
        return 0