Title:The Hitchin Fibration - an entrée to Langlands duality Speaker: Prof John Rice The Hitchin fibration exposes the moduli space of Higgs fields on a compact Riemann surface as a completely integrable dynamical system. Beilinson and Drinfeld established a strong relationship between quantisation of this system and Langlands duality. In the other direction, Donagi and Pantev prove that the fibres of Hitchin fibrations whose gauge groups are Langlands dual, are dual abelian varieties (with some caveats), and that this is a classical limit of the conjectured geometric form of Langlands duality. A larger picture painted by Kapustin and Witten identifies the duality of Hitchin fibrations as mirror symmetry or T-duality, and argues that geometric Langlands duality is S-duality for a particular supersymmetric Yang-Mills system, of which the Hitchin system is a reduction. This is huge territory, but the 2007 paper of Hitchin, Langlands Duality and G2 Spectral Curves, gives a concrete introduction to the phenomena of Langlands dual groups and the duality of the abelian varieties in his fibrations. It also provides the opportunity to consider the basics of lie theory (root systems etc) in this context and to get to know an exceptional group. It is a starting point for insight into the bigger picture of Langlands duality. I propose to give a series of lectures expounding Hitchins paper, filling in the background and expanding on the themes that it touches on. I would be happy to respond the interests and needs of the audience in this regard.