John Venn (born in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, England, August 4, 1834 - died in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK, 4 April 1923 at age 88 years) was a British mathematician who discovered the Venn diagram. By using this Venn diagram, the relation between the set becomes more understandable.
John Venn Biography
John Venn was born in 1834 in Hull, Yorkshire. His mother, Martha Sykes, came from Swanland, near Hull, and died when John was only three. His father was the Rev. Henry Venn who, at the time of the birth of John, was rector of the parish Drypool near Hull.
Henry Venn, a fellow of Queens', comes from a family of distinction. his own father, the grandfather of John, the Rev. John Venn who had been rector of Clapham in south London. He was a leader of Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical Christians centered on his church who campaigned for prison reform and abolition of slavery and cruel sports.
John Venn's father (Henry) also plays an important role in the evangelical Christian movement. Mission Society in East Africa and was founded by evangelical clergy of the Church of England in 1799, and in 1812 it was renamed the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East.
Henry Venn became secretary of this Society from 1841. He moved to Highgate near London in order to carry out the task and held this position until his death in 1873.
John Venn was brought up strictly. It is expected that he would follow the family tradition into the Christian ministry. After Highgate School, he entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1853.
He graduated in 1857 and was soon elected as a fellow 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 science.
Venn also has a rare expertise in machine building. He used his skills to build a machine for bowling cricket balls, which are so good that when the Australian Cricket team visited Cambridge in 1909, Venn's machine clean charmed one top star four times.
Venn's main area of interest and the logic he published three texts on the subject. He wrote a logic which introduces opportunities frequency or frequency interpretation of probability theory in 1866, Symbolic Logic which introduced the Venn diagram in 1881, and Principles of Empirical Logic in 1889.
In 1883, Venn was elected Royal Society. In 1897, he wrote a history lecture, titled The History of Gonville and Caius College biography of 0.1349 to 1897. He started compiling biographical notes alumni of the University of Cambridge, a work which was continued by his son John Archibald Venn (1883-1958) and published as volume 10 Cantabrigienses Alumni in 1922-1953.
John Venn died in 1923 at Cambridge, and was buried nearby at Trumpington Churchyard (Extension).
