John Venn, Happy 180th Birthday!

John Venn, creator of the Eulerian Circles, would be 180 years old today. So, why are we celebrating?

As you can see from the picture above, people deal with eulerian circles, otherwise known as Venn diagrams, in all different walks of life. Venn diagrams are used in used in set theory, probability, logic, statistics, and computer science, among other fields of endeavor. Google thought enough of Venn and his work to make a doodle celebrating his birthday. So, who is John Venn, and what is all this about?

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, John Venn was born 180 years ago today on the 4th of August 1834 in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England, the first child to Anglican clergyman Henry Venn and wife Martha Sykes Venn. John Venn studied with tutors and in private schools until being accepted to the Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge. In 1857, Venn graduated from the University with a degree in mathematics, and was also named a fellow of the University.

In 1859, Venn was ordained an Anglican priest. In 1862, he became a lecturer at the Gonville and Caius College where he taught logic and the philosophy of science. In 1883, he resigned from the Anglican church, feeling his philosophical beliefs were incompatible with the Anglican church. In 1897, Venn published Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, 1349–1897; his Alumni Cantabrigienses (1922), compiled with the help of his son, is a historical list of students, alumni, and officials of Cambridge from its founding to 1900. In 1903, he was named president of Cambridge, a position he served in until his death on April 4, 1923.

Venn’s creation of the Venn Diagram, created in the early 18th century, is actually an adaptation of the Eulerian Circles, created by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler over 300 years ago, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Euler’s circles were essentially circles inside circles. For example, you would have a big circle labelled “ocean”, with smaller circles inside the ocean circle, those labelled “fish”, “coral”, etc. What Venn did was re-associate the circles to each other, where a portion of the circles would overlap, denoting the similarity or correlation the circles shared.

Where Euler’s work seemed to end with mathematics, Venn saw the possibility that the circles could be used in so many different fields of study. It is a testament to Venn’s vision that Venn diagrams are still used to this day, for even more fields than ever before.

Happy Birthday, John Venn, your work is appreciated to this day.

[Modern Image by S.Uchii}