Abstract: Manifold calculus of functors was introduced and developed by T. Goodwillie and M. Weiss in order to study spaces of embeddings. In a few words the goal of their method is to understand how from the spaces Emb(U,N) of smaller open subsets U of M we can describe the space Emb(M,N) of embeddings of the entire manifold M into N. Naively it is sometimes called "patching method". I will describe briefly the ideas of this theory and also explain some recent advances which gives a connection with the theory of operads.