"Gerry" Salton (8 March 1927 – 28 August 1995) was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University.
[2] His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard.
He received a Bachelor's (1950) and Master's (1952) 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.
(The concept of inverse document frequency, a measure of specificity, had been introduced in 1972 by Karen Sparck-Jones.