Gerard Salton

On August 28, 1995, Gerard Salton, Professor of Computer Science, died after a courageous battle against lung cancer. He was a brilliant computer scientist-the man most responsible for the establishment, survival, and recognition of Information Retrieval (IR). The scope of his accomplishments and the impact of his work on the evolution of IR is profound-spanning the gamut of Information Retrieval: the vector space model, term weighting, relevance feedback, clustering, extended Boolean retrieval, term discrimination value, dictionary construction, term dependency, text understanding and structuring, passage retrieval, and of course, automatic text processing using SMART, now the standard upon which modern retrieval systems are based. Gerry Salton was a nurturing, caring advisor. He demanded the highest standards of scholarship for himself and his students. Salton's proudest achievements and enduring legacies are his students-over twenty of whom wrote doctoral dissertations under his guidance. They became leaders in information retrieval; in turn, they "begat'' top students and graduates of their own-educational grandchildren of Gerard Salton-and the legacy continues. He is survived by his wife, Mary (Birnbaum) Salton; his daughter Mariann and her husband Richard Thompson; his son Peter and his wife Susan; his brother Jean Sahlmann and his wife Agnes; and three grandchildren, Morgan Thompson, Kathryn Thompson, and Alex Salton.