Cut up

Reporting from Hebron, Ky. — Like the disturbed genius in Hollywood's "A Beautiful Mind," Walter K. Sartory was a brilliant mathematician with a grave mental illness. It made him the perfect victim.

Sartory worked for 30 years at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was built in secret for the atomic bomb project and became America's largest science and energy lab.

Sartory's work on nuclear weapons remains classified, but he published pioneering papers on reactor design, medical centrifuges and other subjects. He won a top award at the lab and held three patents.

"You only played chess with Walt two or three times because you were always humiliated," said John Eveleigh, a British biochemist who worked at Sartory's side. "And I played chess for Oxford, so I wasn't an amateur."

Sartory was treated most of his life for paranoid schizophrenia. He believed the CIA trained ants to spy on him. He battled social phobias so acute that he turned down a high-paying job rather than submit to an interview.