Conjugacy and Dynamics in Thompsons Groups

We give a unified solution to the conjugacy problem for Thompsons groups F, T, and V. The solution uses strand diagrams, which are similar in spirit to braids and generalize tree-pair diagrams for elements of Thompsons groups. Strand diagrams are closely related to piecewise-linear functions for elements of Thompsons groups, and we use this correspondence to investigate the dynamics of elements of F. Though many of the results in this paper are known, our approach is new, and it yields elegant proofs of several old results.