Michael Sheard says St. Lawrence was the first college he ever heard about. His mother graduated in 1943, and his grandmother was a residence staff member for several years. “I still have a scarlet-and-brown stuffed dog with ‘SLU’ on the ear that she gave me, possibly when I was born,” he says.

His own involvement with St. Lawrence revolves around his position as Rutherford Professor of Mathematics. “The most wonderful moment in teaching comes when we set high expectations for students and they surpass them,” he says.  “In our computer science course Artificial Intelligence, I let students choose and design open-ended projects to work on throughout the semester, and when they become excited, they can produce astounding results.  One year a pair of students wrote a program to solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle.  With the right motivation and the right environment, students can accomplish amazing things.”

Prof. Sheard’s specialties are mathematical logic and set theory. His article “A transactional approach to the logic of truth” has been accepted for publication in the Proceedings of Logic Colloquium '05.  “It comes from an invited plenary address at the European summer meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, in Athens, Greece, in 2005,” he says. Last fall he gave an invited talk entitled “The inner logic of VF” at the New College Logic Conference in Oxford, England.

Outside the classroom, he and his family enjoy canoeing and hiking, “but I am best known around campus for being one of the ‘bird people,’” he says.  “People call me with bird identification questions: ‘Can you tell me what was that bird at my feeder?’”

“Good students, good colleagues, the freedom to pursue ideas wherever they lead,” says Sheard about working at St. Lawrence. “I love mathematics and I love the academic setting which St. Lawrence provides, so there is much to enjoy here.”