John Venn was born in Hull, England in 1834. He graduated from Gonville and Caius College, (part of Cambridge University) in 1857, and was ordained a priest in 1859. In 1862, Venn returned to Cambridge University as a lecturer in Moral Science.
Venn worked in logic and probability theory, extending George Boole's mathematical logic. He is best known to students of probability and set theory for the schematic diagrams, known as Venn diagrams, that are used to illustrate set operations. Venn was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1883.
Venn's published mathematical books include Logic of Chance (1866), Symbolic Logic (1881), and The Principles of Empirical or Inductive Logic (1889).
Venn was also passionately interested in the history of Cambridge University. He wrote The Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College 1349–1897 in 1897. He also began a much more ambitious project to write a history of the entire university. Venn was also an inventor, and devised a machine for bowling cricket balls.
Venn died in 1923 in Cambridge.