John Venn

John Venn (* August 4, 1834 in Kingston upon Hull, † April 4, 1923 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician.

Life and work

Venn attended Highgate School in London. From 1853 to 1857 he studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1858 he was ordained as a deacon in Ely and 1859 as a priest. In 1862 he returned to Cambridge as a university lecturer back and devoted himself under the influence of the work of Augustus De Morgan, George Boole and John Stuart Mill of logic and probability theory.

As a professor of logic and natural philosophy Venn taught for 30 years at Cambridge. From about 1890, he occupied himself primarily with the history of his university.

The self-developed inductive logic and methodological tried Venn with the deductive and formalistic of William Rowan Hamilton link. Following Leonhard Euler, he led the graphical representation of the categorical statements of the class logic further ( Venn diagrams ). He coined the term symbolic logic. Furthermore, he examined problems of modal logic.

The first Venn worked the frequency conception of probability in the form of a mathematical theory. His ideas were later taken to probability theory by Hans Reichenbach and developed.

Writings

• The Logic of Chance, 1866
• On some of the characteristics of belief scientific and religious. London / Cambridge: Macmillan 1870
• The foundations of chance, 1872
• Consistency and inference real. Mind 1 (1876 ) 1, 43-52
• On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Prepositions and Reasoning, in: Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, July 1880
• Symbolic Logic. London: Macmillan 1881
• The principles of empirical logic, 1889
• The Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College, 1349-1897
• Sermons ( 2 vols ). 1818 ( 3rd edition )