A special case of great importance to general relativity is a Lorentzian manifold, in which one dimension has a sign opposite to that of the rest. This allows tangent vectors to be classified into timelike, null, and spacelike. Spacetime can be modeled as a 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold.
An n-dimensional differentiable manifold is a generalisation of n-dimensional Euclidean space. In a manifold it may only be possible to define coordinates locally. This is achieved by defining coordinate patches: subsets of the manifold which can be mapped into n-dimensional Euclidean space.