 Venn diagrams were introduced in 1880 by John Venn in a paper entitled "On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings" in the "Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science", about the different ways to represent propositions by diagrams.The use of these types of diagrams in formal logic, according to Frank Ruskey and Mark Weston, is "not an easy history to trace, but it is certain that the diagrams that are popularly associated with Venn, in fact, originated much earlier.They are rightly associated with Venn, however, because he comprehensively surveyed and formalized their usage, and was the first to generalize them".