A historical account on characterizations of -manifolds in Euclidean spaces by tangent cones

A historical account on characterizations of C 1 -manifolds in Euclidean spaces by tangent cones is provided. Old characterizations of smooth manifold (by tangent cones), due to Valiron (1926, 1927) and Severi (1929, 1934) are recovered; modern characterizations, due to Gluck (1966, 1968) and Tierno (1997) are restated. All these results are consequences of the Four-cones coincidence theorem due to [1].