Personal Life
Bullitt was known to be a very slight man who one Kentuckian remarked could “talk faster than any man in Kentucky.”
He was a noted collector of rare mathematics texts. Following a discussion with his friend G. H. Hardy, Bullitt set out to obtain first-edition works by what he considered the twenty-five greatest mathematicians of all time. Following his death, this collection, which grew to include at least 300 volumes by at least sixty different mathematicians, was donated to the University of Louisville. Among the texts in the collection are works by Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Galileo,Copernicus, Euclid, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Leibniz.
In November 1956, thieves cracked a wall safe in his Oxmoor home. Police estimated the amount of valuables taken as high as $250,000, of which $77,000 was recovered by the time Bullitt died a year later.
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