Cogwheels of the Mind: The story of Venn diagrams by A. W. F. Edwards, Johns Hopkins University Press, £17/$25, ISBN 0801874343 Reviewed by Ben Longstaff
IN Manhattan you can eat “pizza Venn”: one half with capers, one half with anchovies, but arranged so that one quarter has both toppings, and one quarter has neither. Of course, it would be far nicer to forget the anchovies altogether, but that’s not the point. The idea of a Venn diagram is to represent classes or sets, and show where they intersect.
Pizza fans excluded, most people are probably more familiar with Venn diagrams…
