Gerard Salton

Who was Gerard Salton?

Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton, 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, which he initiated when he was at Harvard.

Salton was born Gerhard Anton Sahlmann on March 8, 1927 in Nuremberg, Germany. He received a Bachelor's and Master's degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in Applied Mathematics 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.

Salton was perhaps most well known for developing the now widely used vector space model for Information Retrieval. In this model, both documents and queries are represented as vectors of term counts, and the similarity between a document and a query is given by the cosine between the term vector and the document vector.