In this series of lectures we will review different characterizations of rectifiability and uniform rectifiability in terms of different square functions. This line of research was initiated by Peter Jones in 1990 with his celebrated traveling salesman theorem about the beta-numbers, and it was continued by Guy David and Stephen Semmes in their works on uniform rectifiability.
Besides the Jones' square function and its $L^p$-variants, we will review other square functions, like the one in terms of transportation type coefficients (the $\alpha$-numbers), which is specially well suited for the study of singular integral operators acting on rectifiable sets.
Another objective of these lectures is to describe the main ideas of the recent solution of Carleson's $\epsilon^2$-conjecture by Jaye, Tolsa, and Villa about the characterization of tangent points of a Jordan curve in terms of the so-called $\epsilon^2$-square function.