A tree node contains a value, and can also include references to one or more additional tree nodes which are known as “children”.

Trees in computer science are often talked about similarly to family trees. A tree node that references one or more other nodes is called a “parent”.

A tree node can be a “parent” and a “child” simultaneously, because they are not exclusive. For instance, a node ‘b’ can be the child of node ‘a’, while being the parent to nodes ‘d’ and ‘e’. However, a child can only have one parent, while a parent can have multiple children.

There are two ways to describe the shape of a tree. Trees can be wide, meaning that each node has many children. And trees can be deep, meaning that there are many parent-child connections with few siblings per node. Trees can be both wide and deep at the same time.

In a binary search tree, parent nodes can have a maximum of two children. These children are called the “left child” and the “right child”. A binary search tree requires that the values stored by the left child are less than the value of the parent, and the values stored by the right child are greater than that of the parent.

A TreeNode is a data structure that represents one entry of a tree, which is composed of multiple of such nodes.

The topmost node of a tree is called the “root”, and each node (with the exception of the root node) is associated with one parent node. Likewise, each node can have an arbitrary number of child nodes. An implementation of a TreeNode class in Python should have functions to add nodes, remove nodes, and traverse nodes within the tree.