Monday, August 4, 2014

John Venn

John Venn

  1. Today is the 180th birthday of John Venn who was born on 4 August 1834 in Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire to Martha Sykes and Rev. Henry Venn, who was the rector of the parish of Drypool.
  2. Venn was descended from a long line of church evangelicals, including his grandfather John Venn and he also became an Anglican priest, ordained in 1859, serving first at the church in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, and later in Mortlake, Surrey.
  3. He was educated by private tutors until 1853 when he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
  4. In 1857, he obtained his degree in mathematics and became a fellow.
  5. In 1862, he returned to Cambridge University as a lecturer in moral science, studying and teaching logic and probability theory.
  6. In 1868, he married Susanna Carnegie Edmonstone with whom he had one son, John Archibald Venn.
  7. In 1883, he resigned from the clergy having concluded that Anglicanism was incompatible with his philosophical beliefs.
  8. Also in 1883, Venn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was awarded a Sc.D. by Cambridge.
  9. He died on 4 April 1923; the cause of his death was not specified.
  10. John Venn was also an English logician and philosopher more famous for introducing the Venn diagram, which is used in many fields, including set theory, probability, logic, statistics, and computer science.
  11. A Venn diagram or set diagram is a diagram that shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets.
  12. Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 and are used to teach elementary set theory, as well as illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science.
Screenshot of Google's Doodle for the 180th Birthday of John Venn

References:

John Venn
John Venn's 180th Birthday
Venn diagram

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