Professor Paul Hirst

Paul Hirst, Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck College, London, and an MA and research student at Sussex from 1968 to 1972, has died at the age of 57 from a brain haemorrhage. Visit SocietyGuardian online for a full appreciation by Professor Ben Pimlott from Goldsmith's College.

Dr Jim Lawrie

Dr Jim Lawrie, Emeritus Lecturer in Mathematics, died on 7 June after a long struggle with degenerative illness.

Born in 1924 in New Zealand, Jim was just old enough to spend two years in the Royal New Zealand Air Force at the end of the Second World War.

University studies followed before he took up employment with the Magnetic Survey, a New Zealand government organisation for geophysical research. Nine years later and with a string of publications to his name, he started as a research student in applied mathematics at the University of Exeter.

He was awarded his PhD in 1963 and started a lectureship at Sussex in 1965. He stayed until retirement in 1989.

Reticent about himself, Jim said little about his life before Sussex, despite being 40 by the time he started here. However, he once remarked that being given a ticking-off by a Sussex administrator was "worse than having epaulettes torn off", and on another occasion let slip something about "liberating refrigerators from the Americans"; one wonders if these two wartime experiences were connected.

When applying to Sussex in early 1964 Jim had asked for a post "in the Mathematics or Physics department" and, as a Lecturer in Mathematics, mathematics was what he did.

However, in retirement he felt able to revive his old interest in geophysics. Collaboration with Dr Pete Smith of the Space Physics Group led to a joint paper and to valued contributions to the group's research seminar series. In turn, the opportunity to come to the campus from his home in Rottingdean, test computer programs, talk to all and sundry and participate in space physics provided a lifeline for Jim as infirmity intensified.

Professor Charles Goldie

Dean, SMS