You might not have heard of the term Venn diagram, but you certainly have seen it. As Investopedia explains, "A Venn diagram is an illustration that uses circles to show the relationships among things or finite groups of things. Circles that overlap have a commonality while circles that do not overlap do not share those traits."
These kinds of diagrams "help to visually represent the similarities and differences between two concepts” and they have been used since the mid-20th century. Even though they became more widely spread during this period, they existed quite some time before that.
First of all the diagram became more known in the 1880s when English mathematician, logician and philosopher John Venn’s popularized it. That's actually where the name as we now know it comes from.
Even though the diagram was named after the person who popularized them, similar ones were created in the 1700s and they were known as Eulerian circles because it was the Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler who created them. And the confusion doesn’t stop there, because the name was changed by Clarence Lewis in 1918, in his book A Survey of Symbolic Logic.
Venn diagrams are usually used in logic theory, but they've found their way into other fields such as statistics, linguistics, education, and computer sciences. They are also used in business and are a useful tool in comparisons.
And as is evident, they also caught the eye of meme creators as they've become a template to reflect on society or to compare incomparable concepts. They are some of the simplest diagrams and are self-explanatory, so that could have contributed to their popularity on the internet.
According to Know Your Meme, one of the first times the Venn diagram was used as a meme format was probably on the website Indexed on August 9th, 2006. It shows a three-way Venn diagram with overlapping circles. The circles are named Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy. The thing they have in common, according to the creator of the meme, is religious doubt.
Lucidchart also mentions one of the earliest examples of Venn diagram memes. They share one from a 2008 post on the blog I’d Rather Be Writing. It showed one circle which was called ‘what you’d write to only yourself’ and the other one called ‘what you’d write to the entire world.’ The two circles overlapped and what both of the things had in common was that they both belonged on a blog.
Since then, the Venn diagram has been a recognizable format and has been used so often that some don't find it funny anymore and have mocked it, but it seems that it hasn't disappeared completely as there are still people like ParallelParkingInABurka enjoying it.
We would like to know if you are one of those people who enjoys a Venn diagram meme, or do you find that it should remain in the mathematics world instead of trying to be relatable on the internet? Let us know your thoughts and don’t forget to upvote the memes that made you laugh the most!
