Breakthrough In Drawing Complex Venn Diagrams: Goes to 11

00_NOP writes "Venn diagrams are all the rage in this election year, but drawing comprehensible diagrams for anything more than 3 sets has proved to be very difficult. Until the breakthrough just announced by Khalegh Mamakani and Frank Ruskey of the University of Victoria in Canada, nobody had managed to draw a simple (no more than two lines crossing), symmetric Venn diagram for more than 7 sets (only primes will work). Now they have pushed that on to 11. And it's pretty too."

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And it's not true - been done before

[Bozovision]

In 1989 Anthony Edwards figured out how to make Venn diagrams of arbitrary size: http://www.qandr.org/quentin/software/venn

"Dr Edwards came up with an ingenious solution based on segmenting the surface of a sphere, beginning with the equator and the 0 and the +/- 90-degree meridians. It can be extended to an arbitrary number of sets by creating wobbly lines that cross the equator - starting with the pattern of stitching found on a tennis ball. You can unwrap the sphere back onto a plane and the sets still work."