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Gerard Salton
Professor
PhD Harvard University, 1958

Gerard Salton (8 March 1927 in Nuremberg - 28 August 1995) was a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time. His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System.

Salton was born Gerhard Anton Sahlmann on March 8, 1927 in Nuremberg, Germany. He received a Bachelor's (1950) and Master's (1952) degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1958, the last of Howard Aiken's doctoral students, and taught there until 1965, when he joined Cornell University and co-founded its department of Computer Science. He was editor-in-chief of the Communications of the ACM and the Journal of the ACM, and chaired SIGIR.

Salton was an ACM Fellow (elected 1995), received an Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science (1989), and was the first recipient of the SIGIR Award for outstanding contributions to study of information retrieval (1983) -- now called the Gerard Salton Award.

Gerard Salton, who died on August 28th of 1995, was the father of modern search technology. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the SMART informational retrieval system. Salton’s Magic Automatic Retriever of Text included important concepts like the vector space model, Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency (TF), term discrimination values, and relevancy feedback mechanisms.

He authored a 56 page book called A Theory of Indexing which does a great job explaining many of his tests upon which search is still largely based. Tom Evslin posted a blog entry about what it was like to work with Mr. Salton.

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