Finding height in Binary Search Tree

The problem lies in your base case.

“The height of a tree is the length of the path from the root to the deepest node in the tree. A (rooted) tree with only a node (the root) has a height of zero.” – Wikipedia

If there is no node, you want to return -1 not 0. This is because you are adding 1 at the end.

So if there isn’t a node, you return -1 which cancels out the +1.

int findHeight(TreeNode<T> aNode) {
    if (aNode == null) {
        return -1;
    }

    int lefth = findHeight(aNode.left);
    int righth = findHeight(aNode.right);

    if (lefth > righth) {
        return lefth + 1;
    } else {
        return righth + 1;
    }
}

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