Character varieties and knot symmetries

Porti, Joan

Winter Braids VII (Caen, 2017), Winter Braids Lecture Notes (2017), Exposé no. 2, 21 p.

Those are notes of the mini-course given in the school Winter Braids VII, held in Caen from February 27th to March 2nd 2017. They overview the variety of representations and characters of a three-manifold in ${\mathrm{SL}}_2ℂ$, putting emphasis on explicit computations. The notes also discuss the canonical component of a hyperbolic knot, and a recent joint work with Luisa Paoluzzi, on the invariant components of the variety of characters for knot symmetries.

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