Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

Finding the minimum and maximum nodes

The structure of the binary search tree makes searching a node that has a maximum or a minimum value very easy.

To find a node that has the smallest value in the tree, we start traversal from the root of the tree and visit the left node each time until we reach the end of the tree. Similarly, we traverse the right sub-tree recursively until we reach the end to find the node with the biggest value in the tree.

For example, consider the following diagram; we move down from node 6 to 3 and then from node 3 to 1 to find the node with the smallest value. Similarly, to find the maximum value node from the tree, we go down from the root to the right-hand side of the tree, then go from node 6 to node 8 and then ...