John Venn

John Venn.

See also John Venn (regicide). Another John Venn was Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University 1686–1687.

John Venn (August 4, 1834 – April 4, 1923), was a British logician and philosopher, who is famous for conceiving the Venn diagrams, which are used in many fields, including set theory, probability, logic, statistics, and computer science.

He was born in Hull, Yorkshire. He entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in October 1853 and graduated in 1857. Shortly after graduating he was elected a fellow of the college. He was ordained as a deacon at Ely in 1858 and became a priest in 1859. In 1862 he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in moral sciences.

Venn's main area of interest was logic and he published three texts on the subject. He wrote The Logic of Chance which introduced the frequency interpretation of probability in 1866, Symbolic Logic which introduced the Venn diagrams in 1881, and The Principles of Empirical Logic in 1889.

Stained glass window in the dining hall of Caius College, in Cambridge, commemorating John Venn and his invention of the Venn diagram.

In 1897, he wrote a history of his college, called The Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, 1349–1897. A stained glass window in the college commemorates his work.

He is also noteworthy for inventing a cricket bowling machine, which was reportedly most successful, even against the Australian travelling team's best batsmen.

In 1883, he was elected to the Royal Society.

He died in Cambridge, England on 4 April 1923.

There is a building at Hull University called the Venn Building. It was built in 1928 in honour of John Venn, a famous son of the city of Kingston upon Hull.

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