Concept
Venn diagram
Overview
A Venn diagram is a widely used diagram style that shows the logical relation between sets, popularized by John Venn (1834–1923) in the 1880s. The diagrams are used to teach elementary set theory, and to illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics and computer science. A Venn diagram uses simple closed curves on a plane to represent sets. The curves are often circles or ellipses.
Very similar ideas had been proposed before Venn such as by Christian Weise in 1712 (Nucleus Logicoe Wiesianoe) and Leonhard Euler in 1768 (Letters to a German Princess). The idea was popularised by Venn in Symbolic Logic, Chapter V "Diagrammatic Representation", published in 1881.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Now geometrically regular figures, such as a circle, a square, a cube, etc., are commonly adduced by critics of taste as the simplest and most indisputable examples of beauty; and yet they are called regular, because we can only represent them by regarding them as mere presentations of a definite concept which prescribes the rule for the figure (according to which alone it is possible). One of these two must be…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Venn diagram is; the author is tied to Venn diagram in the knowledge graph.
The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of the extension of the sphere of pure reason without the aid of experience. Examples are always contagious; and they exert an especial influence on the same faculty, which naturally flatters itself that it will have the same good fortune in other case as fell to its lot in one fortunate instance. Hence pure reason hopes to be able to extend its empire…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Venn diagram is; the author is tied to Venn diagram in the knowledge graph.
Any such select set is called the set of postulates, or premises, from which the reasoning proceeds. The reasoning is nothing else than the exhibition of the whole pattern of general conditions involved in the pattern derived from the selected postulates.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Venn diagram is.
Philosophers who discussed Venn diagram
Related ideas
- First-order logic
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Immanuel Kant
- Linguistics
- Probability
- Intersection (set theory)
- John Venn
- Truth table
- Statistics
- Set (mathematics)
- Set theory
- C. I. Lewis
- Logic
- Union (set theory)
- Syllogism
- Computer science
- Complement (set theory)
- Boolean algebra
- Cardinality
- Circle
- Proposition
- Erhard Weigel
- Johann Sturm
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.