Venn, John

(from Wikipedia entry)

John Venn FRS (4 August 1834 - 4 April 1923), was a British logician and philosopher. He is famous for introducing the Venn diagram, which is used in many fields, including set theory, probability, logic, statistics, and computer science. John Venn was born on 4 August 1834 in Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire to Martha Sykes and Rev. Henry Venn, who was the rector of parish of Drypool. His mother died when he was three years old. Venn descended from a long line of church evangelicals, including his grandfather John Venn. He would follow his family lineage and become an Anglican priest, ordained in 1859, serving first at the church in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, and later in Mortlake, Surrey.

He was educated by private tutors until 1853 where he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1857, he got his degree in mathematics and became a fellow. In 1862, he returned to Cambridge University as a lecturer in moral science, studying and teaching logic and probability theory.

In 1868, he married Susanna Carnegie Edmonstone with whom he had one son, John Archibald Venn.

In 1883, he resigned from the clergy having concluded that Anglicanism was incompatible with his philosophical beliefs. In the same year, Venn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in the same year was awarded a Sc.D. by Cambridge.

He died on 4 April 1923. His death is unspecified.

For more information, see Wikipedia entry at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Venn .

Created 2015-10-29 by Anna St.Onge.

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http://viaf.org/viaf/88054980 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Venn