An alternative but equivalent definition, avoiding the direct use of maximal atlases, is to consider equivalence classes of differentiable atlases, in which two differentiable atlases are considered equivalent if every chart of one atlas is differentiably compatible with the other atlas. Informally, what this means is that in dealing with a smooth manifold, one can work with a single differentiable atlas, consisting of only a few charts, with the implicit understanding that many other charts and differentiable atlases are equally legitimate.

One can reverse-engineer the above definitions to obtain one perspective on the construction of manifolds. The idea is to start with the images of the charts and the transition maps, and to construct the manifold purely from this data. As in the above discussion, we use the "smooth" context but everything works just as well in other settings.

The above formal definitions correspond precisely to a more informal notation which appears often in textbooks, specifically

With the idea of the formal definitions understood, this shorthand notation is, for most purposes, much easier to work with.

One of the topological features of the sheaf of differentiable functions on a differentiable manifold is that it admits partitions of unity. This distinguishes the differential structure on a manifold from stronger structures (such as analytic and holomorphic structures) that in general fail to have partitions of unity.

There are, however, important differences in the calculus of vector fields (and tensor fields in general). In brief, the directional derivative of a vector field is not well-defined, or at least not defined in a straightforward manner. Several generalizations of the derivative of a vector field (or tensor field) do exist, and capture certain formal features of differentiation in Euclidean spaces. The chief among these are:

There is a map from scalars to covectors called the exterior derivative

A final advantage of this approach is that it allows for natural direct descriptions of many of the fundamental objects of study to differential geometry and topology.