TITLE: About MF Atiyah and R Bott's  1983  paper
QUESTION [11 upvotes]: I am a theoretical physics major student working on string theory. I want to understand the work of MF Atiyah and R Bott, "The Yang-Mills equations over riemann surfaces" . What kinds of mathematical background does it need? books or papers? (I only learned Nakahara's book on geometry) 
Thanks in advance.

REPLY [2 votes]: Just as a reference, there was a summer course given by Alex Waldron at USTC here on "Yang-Mills Equations over Riemann surface", and his aim is to explain the proof of Donaldson's paper from the most basic differential geometry.