The Art of Venn Diagrams

Peter Hamburger and Edit Hepp

Peter Hamburger is a mathematician and his wife, Edit Hepp, is an artist. Together they created a beautiful series of colored images illustrating Venn diagrams on 11 sets which are symmetric. These symmetric sets were discovered only in 2002, and since then it has been proved that symmetric Venn diagrams exist for n sets if and only if n is a prime number. Everyone knows the simple, symmetric Venn diagram on three sets. The ones on 11 are very complicated, and the remarkable images of Hamburger and Hepp were created entirely by hand by Hepp. Curator: Stan Wagon, Mathematics and Computer Science.