‘A Beautiful Mind’- John Nash and wife die in car crash

Princeton University mathematician and Nobel Prize winner, John Nash and his wife were killed in a car crash in New Jersey. He was 86.

His life inspired the book titled “A Beautiful Mind” and its movie adaptation by the same name.

Dr Nash and his wife, Alicia Nash, 82, were on their way home in a taxi when the taxi lost control while trying to overtake another vehicle. The impact caused their immediate demise. The couple were enroute from the airport after a trip to Norway, where he had received the Abel Prize for mathematics from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Dr Nash, who was regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20^th century, was awarded the Nobel in 1994 for his theory of non-cooperative games, also called as Nash equilibrium, a conceptually simple, but powerful, mathematical theory to analayse a wide range of competitive situations, right from corporate rivalries to legislative decision-making. His exemplary work has inspired generations of mathematicians and economists and is now widely used in economics, social sciences and various other fields, including evolutionary biology.

Dr Nash later struggled through paranoid schizophrenia. His wife, Alicia Nash, an MIT physics major, has been credited for saving his life after schizophrenia derailed his career in 1960s.

The toll his illness took and his eventual recovery was captured by the film, starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, which won an Oscar Award for Best Picture in 2001. Following his death, Russell Crowe sent a tweet, “Stunned…my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.”

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