In mathematics, a rigid analytic space is an analogue of a complex analytic space over a nonarchimedean field. Such spaces were introduced by John Tate in 1962, as an outgrowth of his work on uniformizing p-adic elliptic curves with bad reduction using the multiplicative group. In contrast to the classical theory of p-adic analytic manifolds, rigid analytic spaces admit meaningful notions of analytic continuation and connectedness.