Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The quest for a suitable geometric description of major analyticproperties of sets has largely motivated the development of GeometricMeasure Theory in the XXth theory. In particular, the 1880 Painlev\'eproblem and the closely related conjecture of Vitushkin remained amongthe central open questions in the field. As it turns out, their higherdimensional versions come down to the famous conjecture of G. Davidrelating the boundedness of the Riesz transform and rectifiability. Upto date, it remains unresolved in all dimensions higher than 2.However, we have recently showed with A. Volberg that boundedness ofthe square function associated to the Riesz transform indeed impliesrectifiability of the underlying set. Hence, in particular,boundedness of the singular operators obtained via truncations of theRiesz kernel is sufficient for rectifiability. I will discuss thisresult, the major methods involved, and the connections with the G.David conjecture.