John Venn

Venn Window in Caius College Dining Hall, Cambridge

Most of know of John Venn because of his eponymous diagram.  As with so many things in mathematics (and life in general, I imagine) Venn diagrams were named after John Venn though he didn't originate the idea and didn't hand them down to us in quite exactly the form we use today, but his name was the name that stuck.  They are so strongly associated with him that his memorial window in the dining hall of Caius College, Cambridge displays such a diagram in honor of him.  ("Caius" is pronounced "keez.")

I share that about the naming of the diagrams not in any way to disparage Venn's work.  He was an excellent logician who built on the work of Boole and de Morgan.  He extended Boole's work, and he used Venn diagrams in particularly powerful ways (which is probably why they are named for him).  A couple of excellent books for which he is best known are Logic of Chance and Symbolic Logic.

Aside - Pascal's Triangle was not invented by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662); the Chinese were working with it by at least 1050 AD.  The Pythagorean Theorem is not named for Pythagoras, since, as I just learned, there was no Pythagoras - and even had there been, the Mesopotamians used it centuries, perhaps millennia, before the purported date of Pythagoras.  And even the Mobius Strip was not invented by August Ferdinand Mobius but rather by Johann Benedict Listing.

OK - moving on -

Caius Dining Hall - looking toward high table

Venn went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (often just referred to as Caius) in fall of 1853.  Both his father and his grandfather played prominent roles in the evangelical Christian movement, so there was never any thought of John doing anything other than going into the priesthood.  Two years after graduating, he was ordained a priest.  Actually, prior to that he had been ordained a deacon at Ely - just outside of Cambridge.

Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral

Ely Cathedral - octagonal tower

While a student at Caius, Venn had been awarded a mathematics scholarship his second year and went on to graduate as "sixth Wrangler" in the Mathematical Tripos of 1857 (i.e. sixth place of the students who were awarded First Class degrees in mathematics).  He was elected a fellow of the college and later was elected to the Royal Society.

The words above the archways in Caius are meaningful.  One enters with humility - 

 - continues in virtue -

 - and leaves with honor.

Dr. Piers Bursill-Hall graciously showed me around Caius, which was also his college.

Caius has produced twelve Nobel Prize winners (more than any other Cambridge or Oxford College aside from Trinity).  The following few pictures are of the chapel.

Tomb of college founder John Caius

In closing I just want to mention that John Venn had many interests.  In 1888 his interest turned toward history, and he donated all his books on logic to the Cambridge University Library.  He then wrote a history of the college, which involved painstaking and methodical work.  He also had skill for building machines, and one machine he invented was a cricket bowler.  It was so good at bowling cricket balls that when the Australian team visited in 1909, it "clean bowled" one of the top stars four times!