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On the construction of venn diagrams1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Trenchard More Jr.*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Extract

Venn constructed diagrams of up to five simply connected regions that overlapped each other once in each possible way of overlapping. Although Venn did not prove that his diagrams were constructible for more than five simply connected regions — in fact, he preferred to have a doubly connected region in his 5-class diagram — he summarized his method of construction with an intuitive argument: “But for merely theoretical purposes the rule of formulation would be very simple. It would merely be to begin by drawing any closed figure, and then proceed to draw others, subject to the one condition that each is to intersect once and once only all the existing subdivisions produced by those which had gone before.” The method of construction given below leads to a simple topological proof that Venn diagrams can be constructed for any number of simply connected regions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1952

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Footnotes

1

This proof was part of an undergraduate thesis submitted by the author in May, 1952 to the Department of Mathematics, Harvard College. Mr. C. Y. Lee independently proved the same theorem by coordinate geometry. C. Y. Lee, Notes on a Venn diagram of a Boolean function of n variables, Bell telephone laboratories MM-53–3300-25, April 3, 1953.

References

2 Venn, John, On the diagrammatic and mechanical representations of propositions and reasoning, The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin philosophical magazine and journal of science. vol. 10 (1880), pp. 118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 8.