John Venn was born on 4 August 1834 in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire,[5] to Martha Sykes and Rev.

His father Henry had played a significant part in the Evangelical movement and he was also the secretary of the Society for Missions to Africa and the East, establishing eight bishoprics overseas.

[9] Venn experienced, in his words, a "reaction and disgust" to the Tripos which led him to sell his books on mathematics and state that he would never return to the subject.

[9] Following his family vocation, he was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1859, serving first at the church in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, and later in Mortlake, Surrey.

[10] In 1862, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in moral science, studying and teaching political economy, philosophy, probability theory and logic.

His academic writing was influenced by his teaching: he saw Venn diagrams, which he called "Eulerian Circles" and introduced in 1880, as a pedagogical tool.

Of course the device was not new then, but it was so obviously representative of the way in which any one, who approached the subject from the mathematical side, would attempt to visualise propositions, that it was forced upon me almost at once.With his son, Venn developed a bowling machine that was able to impart spin to a cricket ball.

When members of the Australian cricket team visited Cambridge in June 1909, Venn’s machine bowled Victor Trumper, one of their star batsmen.

Venn was also a gardener, regularly taking part in local competitions organised by groups such as the Cambridgeshire Horticultural Society, winning prizes for his roses in July 1885[20] and for his white carrots later that September.