In this article, we derive a topological obstruction to the removal of a isolated degenerate complex tangent to an embedding of a 3-manifold into $\mathbb{ C}^3$ (without affecting the structure of the remaining complex tangents). We demonstrate how the vanishing of this obstruction is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the (local) removal of the isolated complex tangent. The obstruction is a certain homotopy class of the space $\mathbb{ Y}$ consisting of totally real 3-planes in the Grassmanian of real 3-planes in $\mathbb{ C}^3$ (=$\mathbb{ R}^6$). We further compute additional homotopy and homology groups for the space $\mathbb{ Y}$ and of its complement $\mathbb{ W}$ consisting of "partially complex" 3-planes in $\mathbb{ C}^3$.
Categories: math.CV math.GT