In mathematics, the category of manifolds, often denoted Man^p, is the category whose objects are manifolds of smoothness class C^p and whose morphisms are p-times continuously differentiable maps. This forms a category because the composition of two C^p maps is again continuous and of class C^p.

One is often interested only in C^p-manifolds modeled on spaces in a fixed category A, and the category of such manifolds is denoted Man^p(A). Similarly, the category of C^p-manifolds modeled on a fixed space E is denoted Man^p(E).

One may also speak of the category of smooth manifolds, Man^∞, or the category of analytic manifolds, Man^ω.

Like many categories, the category Man^p is a concrete category, meaning its objects are sets with additional structure (i.e. a topology and an equivalence class of atlases of charts defining a C^p-differentiable structure) and its morphisms are functions preserving this structure. There is a natural forgetful functor

U : Man^p → Top

to the category of topological spaces which assigns to each manifold the underlying topological space and to each p-times continuously differentiable function the underlying continuous function of topological spaces. Similarly, there is a natural forgetful functor

U′ : Man^p → Set

to the category of sets which assigns to each manifold the underlying set and to each p-times continuously differentiable function the underlying function.

It is often convenient or necessary to work with the category of manifolds along with a distinguished point: Man_•^p analogous to Top_• - the category of pointed spaces. The objects of Man_•^p are pairs where is a manifold along with a basepoint and its morphisms are basepoint-preserving p-times continuously differentiable maps: e.g. such that ^[1] The category of pointed manifolds is an example of a comma category - Man_•^p is exactly where represents an arbitrary singleton set, and the represents a map from that singleton to an element of Man^p, picking out a basepoint.

The tangent space construction can be viewed as a functor from Man_•^p to Vect_R as follows: given pointed manifolds and with a map between them, we can assign the vector spaces and with a linear map between them given by the pushforward (differential): This construction is a genuine functor because the pushforward of the identity map is the vector space isomorphism^[1] and the chain rule ensures that ^[1]

• Lang, Serge (2012) [1972]. Differential manifolds. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4684-0265-0.
• Tu, Loring W. (2011). An introduction to manifolds (2nd ed.). New York: Springer. ISBN 9781441974006. OCLC 682907530.