Link/cut tree

A link/cut tree is a data structure for representing a forest, a set of rooted trees, and offers the following operations:

The represented forest may consist of very deep trees, so if we represent the forest as a plain collection of parent pointer trees, it might take us a long time to find the root of a given node. However, if we represent each tree in the forest as a link/cut tree, we can find which tree an element belongs to in O(log(n)) amortized time. Moreover, we can quickly adjust the collection of link/cut trees to changes in the represented forest. In particular, we can adjust it to merge (link) and split (cut) in O(log(n)) amortized time.