What is Min Heap?

The min-heap is the heap where each and every node of a complete binary tree is less than or equal to its child node. We can see the example of a min-heap in the below image.

The above heap can be represented in an array as given below.

arr[] = {6,7,12,10,15,17};

We denote,

• “parent(i)=(i-1)/2” for the parent node.
• “left_child(i)=2*i+1” for the left child.
• “right_child(i)=2*i+2” for the right child.

Here, i is the index of the current node in the array.

For example, To find a parent of the 4^th element of the array given below we use parent(4)=(4-1)/2=1^th node or element at the index at 1 in an array. We are going to use these three formulas in the implementation of the min heap.

In this article, we will learn the implementation of min heap in C programming language.

A heap is a data structure like a tree with some special properties. The basic requirement of the heap is that the value of a node must be greater than equal to (or smaller than equal to) the value of its children and the tree should be a complete binary tree.