John Venn

“Ask someone about John Venn and the chances are they’ll mention the diagrams. But, as this biography by Verburgt shows, there is much more to Venn than those intersecting circles.”  * Times Literary Supplement *
“Verburgt’s book is well worth reading. It sheds new light on one side of intellectual life in Victorian England.”
  * SIAM News *
“By interweaving the life and work of John Venn—today remembered mainly as the inventor of the eponymous diagram—Verburgt animates an important and often overlooked figure in the history of probability theory and logic, revealing Venn to be a crucial ‘missing link’ in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. He shows that Venn’s religious transformation provides insight into how a cleric of the time could reconcile religion with a post-Darwinian view of the natural world. Indeed, had he been born forty years earlier, he could have been a worthy member of the Philosophical Breakfast Club. An essential read for anyone interested in Venn, probability theory, logic, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual history. -- Laura J. Snyder, author of The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World
"You’ll never see a Venn diagram in the same way. This fine biography brings a complex and sometimes intellectually tortured polymath vividly to life for the first time, shedding new light on religion, science, and philosophy in the Victorian era." -- James A. Secord, author of Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age
"John Venn died in 1923, and for the next century his academic work, and indeed his life, has had little critical attention. When fifty years ago my elder daughter was taught about Venn's diagram in her Cambridge school, I asked her if they told her who Venn was. 'Oh, was he a person?' she replied. So I took her to the local churchyard (for I knew Venn lived in our parish) and we soon found his grave, overgrown and neglected. Now at last, in this wonderful scholarly book, Verburgt ends this neglect with a dozen chronological chapters divided into the main themes of logic, probability, moral science, religious thought, and biography. Venn was one of the stalwart reformers of Victorian Cambridge as it arose from its slumbers, helping to start a Moral Sciences Tripos. For the whole of his academic life he was employed by his individual Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius, where he had read mathematics as a student and to which he was devoted. His memorial can be found there, in the dining hall: a stained-glass window depicting the diagram for three sets. This is an inspirational book for students and scholars of the history of philosophy and science." -- A. W. F. Edwards, author of Cogwheels of the Mind: The Story of Venn Diagrams