John Venn

John Venn, (August 4, 1834 - April 4, 1923), was a British mathematician, 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 in 1866, Symbolic Logic which introduced the Venn diagrams in 1881, and The Principles of Empirical Logic in 1889.

In 1883, he was elected to the Royal Society.

He died in Cambridge, England on April 4th, 1923.