In a recent important breakthrough D. Christodoulou has solved a long standing problem of General Relativity of evolutionary formation of trapped surfaces in the Einstein-vacuum space-times. He has identified an open set of regular initial conditions on an outgoing null hypersurface (both finite and at past null infinity) leading to a formation a trapped surface in the corresponding vacuum space-time to the future of the initial outgoing hypersurface and another incoming null hypersurface with the prescribed Minkowskian data. In this paper we give a simpler proof for a finite problem by enlarging the admissible set of initial conditions and, consistent with this, relaxing the corresponding propagation estimates just enough that a trapped surface still forms. We also reduce the number of derivatives needed in the argument from two derivatives of the curvature to just one. More importantly, the proof, which can be easily localized with respect to angular sectors, has the potential for further developments.

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Let$C$and$C$′ be two smooth self-transverse immersions of$S$^{1}into ℝ^{2}. Both$C$and$C$′ subdivide the plane into a number of disks and one unbounded component. An isotopy of the plane which takes$C$to$C$′ induces a one-to-one correspondence between the disks of$C$and$C$′. An obvious necessary condition for there to exist an area-preserving isotopy of the plane taking$C$to$C$′ is that there exists an isotopy for which the area of every disk of$C$equals that of the corresponding disk of$C$′. In this paper we show that this is also a sufficient condition.

We prove sharp weighted weak type (1,1) estimates for rough singular integral operators on homogeneous groups. Similar results are shown for singular integrals on $\mathbb{R}^{2}$ with the generalized homogeneity.