US mathematician John Nash, who inspired the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, has died in a car crash along with his wife. Nash, 86, and his 82-year-old wife Alicia were killed when their taxi crashed in New Jersey, BBC reports.
Just a few days ago, Nash had received a prize from the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in Oslo with New York University mathematician Louis Nirenberg, who said he’d chatted with the couple for an hour at the airport in Newark before they’d gotten the cab.
New Jersey State Police say the Nashes were both ejected from the cab in the crash around 4:30 p.m.
Saturday. They were not wearing seat belts. The taxi driver, Tarek Girgis, was sent to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. A passenger in the Chrysler was transported by ground to Princeton University Hospital complaining of neck pain.
No charges have been filed in the accident, which is still under investigation.
The mathematician is renowned for his work in game theory, winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994. His breakthroughs in maths – and his struggles with schizophrenia – were the focus of the 2001 film.
Nash married Alicia Larde in 1957, when he was a rising star in the maths world. But he developed severe schizophrenia soon after, and Alicia had him committed for psychiatric care several times. The couple divorced in 1962.
“I was disturbed in this way for a very long period of time, like 25 years,” Nash said in an interview on the Nobel website.
The two stayed close, and his condition had begun to improve by the 1980s. They remarried in 2001.
Alicia Nash helped care for her husband, and the two later became prominent mental health advocates.
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