August 4, 2014 marked the 180th anniversary of the birth of John Venn, one of the mathematicians who changed science thanks to his innovative vision of his discipline. And Google honored him by dedicating an interesting Doodle full of diagrams as a game for Internet users. Why was it so important?
The full name may not sound like anything at all to you, but you are probably more familiar with the term “Venn diagram” , studied at school. Well, Mr. John Venn was the creator of this system of representation that established relationships between sets. Thus there could be an intersection, inclusion or disjunction based on their position. Now it seems very simple to us, but in its day, during the 19th century, it managed to change the vision of mathematics, making it more deductive and obtaining important advances in inductive logic.
Venn diagrams were presented in 1880 through a work entitled ” On the Employment of Geometrical Diagrams for the Sensible Representation of Logical Propositions “, something like “The use of geometric diagrams for the representation of logical propositions”. The study, published in the specialized journal Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society , would allow, in later years, to visually reveal the most basic operations of set theory.
The Doodle consists of a series of simple divided drawings related to different subjects that can be linked together, which in the end generates an image at the intersection of both circles where they meet . For example, if you select “transport” in the left circle and “with wings” in the right circle, an airplane appears at the intersection.
John Venn passed away on April 4, 1923 in Cambridge.
