Abstract: | Let C be an elliptic curve defined over Q. Let p be a prime where C has good reduction. By definition, p is anomalous for C if the Hasse invariant at p is congruent to 1 modulo p. The phenomenon of anomalous primes has been shown by Mazur to be of great interest in the study of rational points in towers of number fields. This paper is devoted to discussing the Hasse invariants and the anomalous primes of elliptic curves admitting complex multiplication. The two special cases Y2 = X3 + a4X and Y2 = X3 + a6 are studied at considerable length. As corollaries, some results in elementary number theory concerning the residue classes of the binomial coefficients (n2n) (Resp. (n3n)) modulo a prime p = 4n + 1 (resp. p = 6n + 1) are obtained. It is shown that certain classes of elliptic curves admitting complex multiplication do not have any anomalous primes and that others admit only very few anomalous primes. |