Of course nice / "proper" / usable Venn diagrams use only round(-ish) shapes so they are easy to decipher. If you stick to this limitation, you can visualize up to 3 sets in 2D (using circles), 4 sets in 3D (using spheres), then it gets tricky...
Santiago Ortiz's venn was from 2013 (via archive.org) . I had forgotten I'd seen that, thanks for sharing.
kugestu 11 hours ago [-]
Really nice theoretical exercise!
For practical visualization, an UpSet plot is a great option: https://upset.app/
JSR_FDED 3 hours ago [-]
TIL! Upset plots are useful and easy to understand.
renewiltord 7 hours ago [-]
Required attribution notice too big. Can’t see myself using it.
keeeba 11 hours ago [-]
Please don’t actually use these 5,6,7-way Venn diagrams for anything practical, they’re virtually useless and communicate nothing.
somat 36 minutes ago [-]
There is always the complicated wires puzzle from "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes". Where a 5 way Venn diagram encodes what action you need to take for a given state.
However you could make a good argument that having a complicated and confusing diagram is the point of that puzzle.
roadside_picnic 10 hours ago [-]
Technically a Venn diagram's entire point is to visualize all possible set relations between N sets. Their "practical" use is explicitly visualizing this.
In popular terminology they are very often confused with Euler Diagrams [0] which represent meaningful relations in sets but not all possible. You shouldn't create Euler Diagrams this complex, but the raison d'etre of Venn diagrams is to visualize the complex nature of set relations.
How did you make this? It is nice. Why does the red line have a heart-shaped bounce/curve in the open white space instead of just being round?
recursive 5 hours ago [-]
Looks like sinusoids in polar coordinates
pierrec 2 hours ago [-]
The source has a distinct face-melting vibe. Judging from leftover variables, seems like part of the original plan was to make a 7-way Venn diagram of these broad disciplines: "ART INTERFACE SCIENCE LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY HUMANISM NETWORKS".
The possible resulting combinations also seem to have remained in the code, going from tame concepts like "illustration" and "games", down to gems like "folksonomy", "hypernarrative", "facebook" (??)
I’m wondering what’s the proper way to draw Venn diagrams.
I’ve seen that Graphviz has a “nice to have” mention about them, and there are a few simple JS libraries - mostly for two sets. Here’s also my own attempt using an LLM [1].
But maybe someone knows a more general or robust solution - or a better way to achieve this?
In the future, I’d like to be able, for example, to find the intersection between two Venn diagrams of three sets each etc.
the comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742907 have some discussion about projects that take a "focused algorithm for various different diagram types" approach vs graphviz's one size fits all approach. worth checking to see if any of them do venn diagrams.
adverbly 12 hours ago [-]
Beautiful! I want to get this on a t-shirt!
Sparkenstein 6 hours ago [-]
Can this be configurable? Like 8..9..etc
cubefox 12 hours ago [-]
The website isn't working for me (Android Firefox/Chrome).
akdor1154 12 hours ago [-]
Nor Firefox Android, even in Desktop mode.
JoBrad 11 hours ago [-]
Same for iOS.
anon291 12 hours ago [-]
Nice! I wonder if there's a mathematical theorem to describe the possible shapes for a 2-d venn diagram of N sets or if there's an N for which it is no longer possible (or maybe it's possible for all N!?). Probably an application of graph theory and Euler's formula to determine feasibility and then something else to figure out the shape constraints. Never thought about it, but an interesting idea.
I was in a genetics graduate program when this was published, and this spread like wildfire.
This fork shows an older version with all the shapes turned on and filled with original colors: https://observablehq.com/d/4a5120e490fa9da4
Santiago Ortiz's venn was from 2013 (via archive.org) . I had forgotten I'd seen that, thanks for sharing.
https://bombmanual.com/web/index.html#ComplicatedWires
However you could make a good argument that having a complicated and confusing diagram is the point of that puzzle.
In popular terminology they are very often confused with Euler Diagrams [0] which represent meaningful relations in sets but not all possible. You shouldn't create Euler Diagrams this complex, but the raison d'etre of Venn diagrams is to visualize the complex nature of set relations.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_diagram
http://162.243.213.31/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ven3.png
The possible resulting combinations also seem to have remained in the code, going from tame concepts like "illustration" and "games", down to gems like "folksonomy", "hypernarrative", "facebook" (??)
https://moebio.com/research/sevensets/Main.js
But maybe someone knows a more general or robust solution - or a better way to achieve this? In the future, I’d like to be able, for example, to find the intersection between two Venn diagrams of three sets each etc.
[1] https://vitalnodo.github.io/FSLE/
https://venn.bio-spring.top/intro#nvennr