Simon Fairthorne died peacefully on 14 May 2017 after a brief illness, and will be much missed in the Department of Mathematics.

He moved to King's in 1985, having been a lecturer at Queen Elizabeth College. Three colleges (King's, QEC and Chelsea) merged that year. Visitors and external examiners were surprised at the popularity of his 3rd year course on homological algebra at QEC, but many students were simply choosing "the module that Dr Fairthorne teaches". At QEC he was also the person who knew all  the students and the one they looked to for advice.When QEC acquired its first computers and a link to the University of London mainframe, Simon switched his interest to computing. His book Using Computers, coauthored with Brian Meek, was published by Ellis Horwood in 1977.After his retirement in 1999, Simon continued to teach the 2nd and 3rd year module "Discrete Mathematics" for many years, explaining algorithms in diverse topics in number theory, graph theory and cryptography. Here too he was regarded (to quote a student this year) as a "wonderful lecturer". He gave a revision lecture for his course on 28 April, without realising that it would be his last.