Biography: John Venn | Mathematical and logical British.

(Drypool, 1834 - Cambridge, 1923) Mathematical and logical British who are diagrams that bear his name.

John Venn

Member of a pious family, at the age of twenty-five was ordered priest and since 1862 taught as Professor of logic and philosophy of science at Cambridge, where he would reside until his death. To 1883, however, he abandoned the priesthood as incompatible with their philosophical beliefs Anglicanism.

Considered one of the creators of the mathematical logic, John Venn danaan for his research on inductive logic. He is especially known for his method of graphical representation of propositions (according to its quality and quantity) and syllogisms. The Venn diagrams allow, in addition, a check of the truth or falsity of a syllogism.

Representation of propositions with diagrams Venn (table included in his book symbolic logic, 1881)

Later, and thanks to its clarity and simplicity, his diagrams became popular and were used to visually display the most basic operations of the theory of sets, developed from 1874 by Georg Cantor from the ideas of Bernhard Bolzano and perfected, already in the 20th century, by Ernst Zermelo.

The works of John Venn include random logic (1866), which deals with the theory of probabilities; Symbolic logic (1881), which includes his famous diagram, and the principles of empirical or inductive logic (1889). Interestingly, in his later years he not delved into such matters, but that he devoted himself to studying history and the College was formed in which of the University of Cambridge, as well as his own family.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas