John Gerald Cleary (19 October 1950 – 16 January 2014) was a New Zealand-Canadian professor of computer science, entrepreneur, politician and promoter of Transcendental Meditation.
Cleary received his secondary education at St Thomas of Canterbury College, Christchurch.
After working in the private sector in Canada, he returned to New Zealand to the University of Waikato,[2] an association he maintained for the rest of his life.
His most cited work is in the fields of data compression, machine learning, and logic programming.
[4] In particular, he independently discovered arithmetic coding and invented the prediction by partial matching (PPM) compression technique.