This is the danger: humorous or cautionary Venn diagrams are pretty simple and it is easy to place an interpretation on them that the author did not intend. This can make the apparent accusation “you did not study effectively” seem harsh. Suppose that a student who has seen this Venn diagram has flunked a test because their dog just died and they are upset. There are two categories, but the circles do not overlap, and so there are no common elements in the two sets. Since pop culture supplies the “rules” for this situation, this is an exercise in creativity, not precision mathematics.Īn instructor might use the two-category Venn diagram below to explain to students how important effective studying is. Try giving students the top diagram - with only the three categories filled in - and ask them to fill in the other four areas. This example also gives us a sense of how Venn diagrams can be used as a creative prop. If you perform an internet search on “Venn diagram jokes”, this one will probably show up along with many others. Since this Venn diagram is about bad science fiction, the quality that all three groups have in common is that they want to kill all humans! This Venn diagram is intended to be at least a little funny. Note that the triple intersection is still blank - what do zombies, robots and aliens have in common? In this case the intersections are showing common qualities that the two types of things have. Robots and aliens both have access to high technology. Zombies and aliens both have a taste for human flesh.

Zombies and robots are things that do not have emotion. Now let’s include all the two-way intersections. This diagram focuses on zombies, robots, and aliens, but leaves blank the intersections of things in common with zombies and robots, with robots and aliens, and with zombies and aliens. Mad scientists, for example, are not marked and you can think of them as being in the white area outside the three circles. There are other types of science fiction monsters, but a Venn diagram can focus on just some sets. The Venn diagram on science fiction monsters, below, is partly filled in. Since all the primes except 2 are odd, the only thing in the intersection of the even and prime numbers is 2, which the diagram shows. The special sets shown in the diagram are the even numbers and the prime numbers. This is called the universal set, which is fancy talk for everything the diagram covers. The example at the top of the post is about the “positive whole numbers”. Optionally, the area of different parts of the diagram can give you information about the size of the set of things in that part of the diagram. A Venn diagram takes different sets of objects and diagrams them as circles - or other shapes - with objects in both sets appearing in the intersections of the circles.

We will also see that there are still graduate research level questions about Venn diagrams. In this post we not only look at the math, but humor and the use of Venn diagrams as a creative prop. Most students encounter these early in their education and they seem pretty simple. This week on Occupy Math, we look at Venn diagrams.

Funny venn diagrams