Category:Venn diagrams

Comics with Venn diagrams.

These are not to be confused with Euler diagrams, as they are only a subset of Euler diagrams.

For Venn diagrams every possible intersections there could be must be shown. In general for an n component Venn diagram there must be all 2ⁿ hypothetically possible zones, corresponding to some combination of inclusion or exclusion in each of the component sets. An Euler diagram only needs to show the zones that have common objects.

A Venn diagram with 2 circles, see 668: Pandora, has 2² = 4 zones; one overlap zone, two zones without overlap and one outside zone. For 3 circles, see 112: Baring My Heart, there must be 2³ = 8 zones; one zone with all three circles overlapping, three zones with two circles overlapping, three zones without overlap and one outside zone.

So far only Venn diagram with two or three circles have been used in xkcd. With just one more circle there would already need to be 16 zones, only five of which would not be inside more than one circle.

For an example of an xkcd Euler diagram see for instance the Euler diagram in 1810: Chat Systems with 24 circle. This would have resulted in 2²⁴ zone (a bit less than 16,8 million zones) should it have been drawn as a Venn diagram, with almost all of the zones being empty.