Brief history of john venn

Working with his son he then started the immense task of compiling a history of Cambridge University Alumni Cantabrigienses.

Brief history of john venn

The first volume, published incontained 76, names and covered the period up to It was: " The Venns, father and son, spared no industry in building up these records, which are of extraordinary value to historians and genealogists Mind 1 1. Symbolic Logic. London: Macmillan and Company. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 4: 47 — Caius College.

He found the Mathematical Tripos unsuited to his mathematical style, complaining that the handful of private tutors he worked with "always had the Tripos prominently in view". In contrast, Venn wished to investigate interesting ideas beyond the syllabus. Nonetheless, he was Sixth Wrangler upon sitting the exams in January His academic writing was influenced by his teaching: he saw Venn diagramswhich he called " Eulerian Circles " and introduced inas a pedagogical tool.

Venn was known for teaching students across multiple Cambridge collegeswhich was rare at the time. He also criticized the estimation of random processes such as the births of boys and girls as a function only of the occurrence of each event; he asserted that the distribution of births in families was sought, and presented data on British families with 4,5 or 6 children.

He expanded his lecture course on logic in his book Symbolic Logicthe origin of that phrase, incidentally. He largely followed Boole's ideas on the algebra of logic, with modifications to the interpretation of some notations. One of its virtues is the many historical references, for which he drew on his own extensive library now kept in the Cambridge University Library.

His own diagrams used convex figures to represent each predicate in a given case, drawn such that all possible intersections were illustrated; then empty subclasses were shaded in. This kind of representation is more general but more clumsy than Euler's and convex shapes can only work for four predicates. Venn's interest turned towards history and he signalled this change in direction by donating his large collection of books on logic to the Cambridge University Library in He wrote a history of his college, publishing The Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College inwhich The annals of a clerical family trace the history of his own family back to the seventeenth century and record that he was the eighth generation of his family to have a university education.

In he published a work on historical biography, namely a treatise on John Caius, one of the founders of his College. Three years later he published Early Collegiate Life which collected many of his writings describing what life was like in the early days of Cambridge University.