John Nash, the famous mathematician whose life was depicted in the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’, died along with his wife in a road accident on Saturday.
According to NJ.com, the two were killed when the driver of the taxi they were in lost control while trying to pass another car on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The 86-year-old Nash his 82-year-old wife Alicia had been married for 60 years and were living in Princeton. Apparently they were not wearing seatbelts and were thrown from the car. The taxi driver was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
Nash was born in West Virginia, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, a year before joining the mathematics department at Princeton. He became known for his work in game theory and for battling paranoid schizophrenia, as described in the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind,” starring Russell Crowe.
Alicia took care of him as he struggled with his mental illness, and they became mental health advocates after their son John was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Crowe wrote on Twitter on Sunday that he was stunned by reports of the death of Nash and his wife, Alicia.
“An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts,” he wrote on Twitter.
Last week Nash received the Abel Prize for mathematics in Norway, sharing the prize with his long-time colleague Louis Nirenberg. Their work related to nonlinear partial differential equations.
Nirenberg, at his home on Sunday, said that he had known John Nash since the 1950s. He said that Nash was a “wonderful mathematician and person”. He had flown back from Norway with the two, and was sharing a taxi from the airport with them when they died.
