Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In (3), J. Lewittes establishes a connection between the number of fixed points of an automorphism of a compact Riemann surface and Weierstrass points on the surface; Lewittes′ techniques are analytic in nature. In (4), D. L. McQuillan proved the result by purely algebraic methods and extended it to arbitrary algebraic function fields in one variable over algebraically closed ground fields, but with restriction to tamely ramified places. In this paper we will give a different proof of the theorem and show that it is an elementary consequence of the Riemann-Hurwitz relative genus formula. Moreover, we can remove the tame ramification restriction.