Wild character varieties and wild mapping class groups
Philip Boalch, Ecole Normale Superieure and CNRS, France


The wild character varieties are a new class of symplectic/Poisson varieties 
that generalise the complex character varieties of Riemann surfaces. They were
first defined analytically in 1999 and more recently there is a purely 
algebraic approach generalising the quasi-Hamiltonian framework. I'll describe 
the main features of this story, including the link to meromorphic Higgs 
bundles, and the natural generalisations of the notions of "Riemann surface" 
and "mapping class group" that it leads to.

List of lectures (approx. 40-45 min each)

1) motivation, background and examples
2) wild nonabelian Hodge theory on curves
3) wild character varieties and Stokes local systems
4) wild mapping class groups