Venn Diagram

A Venn diagram is an illustration that utilizes circles, either overlapping or non-overlapping, to depict a relationship between finite groups of things. This diagram was named after John Venn, an English philosopher and logician, in 1880.

The basic structure of the Venn diagram is typically overlapping circles, with items in the overlapping section bearing a commonality. Items residing in the outer portions of the circles do not share specified common traits.

Venn diagrams have long been recognized for their usefulness on an educational level. Since the mid-20th century, these diagrams have been used as part of the introductory logic curriculum and in elementary-level educational plans around the world.

The English logician John Venn invented the diagram in 1880; however, Venn originally called the illustration Eulerian circles. The term Venn diagram did not appear until 1918 when Clarence Lewis, a U.S. academic philosopher and the eventual founder of conceptual pragmatism, referred to the circular depiction as the Venn diagram in his book "A Survey of Symbolic Logic."

Venn studied and taught logic and probability theory at Cambridge University, where Venn developed his method of utilizing diagrams to illustrate set theory. Venn published a prolific, precedent-setting work "The Logic of Chance," a book that explicated the frequency theory of probability. Venn touted that probability should be established based on the regularity that something is predicted to occur, contrary to popular educated assumptions. Venn also developed and more fully realized mathematician George Boole’s theories in his book "Symbolic Logic" in 1881."Symbolic Logic" is also the work in which Venn highlighted what would eventually become the Venn diagram.

While Venn diagrams are, at a basic level, simple pictorial representations of the relationship that exists between two sets of ‘things,’ they are much more complex in both their orientation and their applications. Still, the streamlined purpose of the Venn diagram has led to their popularized use to illustrate concepts and groups, and are considered trademark tools for the teaching of beginner-level logic and math.

Consider drawing a Venn diagram to examine four-legged animals and domesticated animals. Obviously, a vast number of animals have four legs. But how many of such animals have been domesticated? Dogs and cats would be two examples of four-legged creatures that would fall in the overlapping space of the two circles. A tiger, however, would reside only in the circle representing four-legged animals, while a chicken would be an example of a domesticated animal that does not have four legs and thus would exist only in the circle representing domesticated animals.