The complex structure on a complex manifold pulls back to what's called a CR structure on any real codimension 1 submanifold. The structure induced on a submanifold of higher codimension is a CR structure if a non-degeneracy condition holds. It's possible to describe these structures intrinsically, without reference to an embedding. I don't know anything else.


I'd be happy with whatever kind of answer to the title question, but here are some more specific ones:


1. Does CR stand for Cauchy-Riemann, or what?
2. What kind of local invariants do CR manifolds have? Are there coordinates around every point that look like a real hyperplane in C^n? Or can there be some curvature or something.
3. Can there be continuous families of CR structures on a given manifold? If the manifold is compact can these families (mod diffeomorphism) be infinite-dimensional?
4. I have the impression, just from arxiv postings and seminar titles, of CR geometry being studied more in analysis than in softer geometric fields. Is that accurate, and if so what accounts for it?



What are CR manifolds like?
CR does stand for Cauchy-Riemann.


CR structures on 3 dimensional manifolds arise as the boundaries of complex (or almost-complex) 4 manifolds; if these boundaries are strictly *pseudo-convex* (i.e. convex in "holomorphic directions") the CR structure on the 3-manifold is a contact structure (if the boundary is only (pseudo-)convex or (Levi) flat, the CR structure integrates to a confoliation or a foliation respectively). There can be infinite dimensional families of foliations on a 3-manifold; more generally, whenever the CR structure is "non-generic" or integrable, one has continuous moduli, otherwise (eg in the contact structure case) one has discrete moduli (to be explicit: what has discrete moduli is the contact structure, not the "CR+contact structure".)


