John Venn

Born in Hull on August 4, 1834, John Venn studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he later spent much of his academic life. He was ordained in the Church of England, but over time his work became more centered on scholarship, teaching, and the study of logic.

Venn is remembered above all for the diagram that now bears his name, a simple visual way of showing how groups overlap. His writing on logic and probability, including The Logic of Chance and Symbolic Logic, helped shape how these subjects were taught and understood in the late nineteenth century.

He died in Cambridge on April 4, 1923. More than a century later, his name remains familiar far beyond philosophy and mathematics, thanks to a diagram so clear and useful that it became part of everyday learning.