1. A method of summarizing text, where the text consists of a number of sentences, and where each sentence includes a number of terms, comprising the steps of: (a) identifying each sentence in the text; (b) identifying each term in each sentence; (c) generating a matrix, where each column in the matrix represents a sentence in the text, and where each row in the matrix represents a term in the text; (d) replacing each entry in the matrix by a product of the matrix entry and a user-definable function that decays exponentially; (e) determining the Euclidean length of each column by squaring the entries in the corresponding column, summing the squares, and taking the square root of the sum; (f) selecting the column with a maximum Euclidean length as a summary sentence; (g) reducing the Euclidean lengths of the columns not selected in step (f); and (h) returning to step(e) if another summary sentence is desired, otherwise returning the selected summary sentences as the summary of the text.