VENN, JOHN

(1834–1923)

English logician and probability theorist. Born in Hull, Venn was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in 1857, and President in 1903. His workThe Logic of Chance(1867) is an early exploration of the frequency theory of probability . HisSymbolic Logic(1881) was hugely influential as the first successful formulation of the algebraic approach to logic pioneered by the mathematician Boole.