William Marshall Bullitt Collection

Louisville attorney William Marshall Bullitt began to collect rare mathematics books in 1936. Building upon a family history of book collecting and his own passion for mathematics, Bullitt set out to gather first editions works by the twenty-five greatest mathematicians of all time, a goal established during a parlor game instigated by his friend G.H. Hardy. Within a decade Bullitt had amassed over 300 volumes by sixty mathematicians and astronomers. Except for a loan of choice volumes to Harvard for a 1953 exhibition, he kept the collection in his law office where he could refer to his favorites and use them as examples when he asked young attorneys aspiring to employment with his firm, “How much mathematics have you had?”

Mr. Bullitt, shown here with his wife Nora in the library at Oxmoor, their home in Louisville, left all his books to her when he died in 1957. The following year, Mrs. Bullitt gave the rare mathematics and astronomy books to the University of Louisville. Mr. Bullitt's files of correspondence with mathematicians and rare book dealers joined the collection in 1980, thanks to the initiative of Uof L Mathematics professor Richard M. Davitt. Although William Marshall Bullitt enjoyed success as an expert in actuarial law and even served as Solicitor General of the United States under President Taft, his avocation as a mathematician kept him active in the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. He participated in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, served on the Visiting Committee for the Department of Mathematics at Harvard and corresponded with Albert Einstein. Einstein's gratitude for Bullitt's sponsorship of Karl Loewner during the war is reflected in signed copies of the great physicist's work found in the collection. The selection of mathematicians represented is a credit to Bullitt's knowledge, the enthusiasm of his friends G.H. Hardy and Harlow Shapley and their colleagues, and the recommendations of E.T. Bell, author of a popular work outlining the lives of great mathematicians. The presence of monumental works by Copernicus and Kepler, along with Rheticus' first statement of the Copernican system, is due to the advice of savvy book dealers and Bullitt's own instincts as a collector desiring books of great rarity and value. Bullitt made his final purchase for the collection, Abel's Mémoire sur les équations algébriques, in 1951 for $500, an "outrageous price" in his estimation. Today the William Marshall Bullitt Collection of Rare Mathematics and Astronomy is priceless, not only for faculty and students at the University of Louisville, but for those to whom we offer a subset list of a 370 volume collection.