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John Nash dead: A Beautiful Mind mathematician and wife Alicia killed in a car crash, say police John Nash dead: A Beautiful Mind mathematician and wife Alicia killed in a car crash, say police
(about 7 hours later)
John Forbes Nash Jr and his wife Alicia Nash have been killed after a taxi collision in New Jersey, according to police. John Nash, the Nobel laureate whose life as both a genius mathematician and a victim of cruel mental disorders inspired the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, has died with his wife, Alicia Nash, in a crash on a busy stretch of motorway in New Jersey. He was 86 years old and his wife was 82.
The mathematician, who inspired the film A Beautiful Mind, and his wife of nearly 60 years died on Saturday in a crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. They were on the way to their home near Princeton University late on Saturday after flying from Oslo, where Mr Nash received a prize for mathematics from King Harald V. Police said that the driver lost control of the taxi they were riding in and struck a central reservation barrier. The two were thrown from their vehicle. They may not have been wearing seatbelts.
The couple, who lived in Princeton, were travelling in the left lane of the turnpike, according to State Police Sgt Gregory Williams. Russell Crowe, the actor who portrayed Mr Nash in the film, said he was “stunned” on hearing of the accident. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Jennifer Connolly as Alicia Nash, A Beautiful Mind won an Oscar for best picture. “My heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts,” Mr Crowe said on Twitter.
The driver lost control of the vehicle, crashing into the guard rail. The couple were ejected from the car. They are not believed to have been wearing seatbelts. The taxi driver was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Mr Nash was celebrated for his work on so-called “game theory”, which used mathematical theorems to describe and predict the outcomes of contests, whether between individuals, states or corporations. He shared the 1995 Nobel prize for economics with two colleagues, the game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten.
John Nash was 86 and Alicia Nash 82. His work was in time widely adopted, including in the fields of business and diplomacy. But his career for a long period was derailed by mental dysfunction, eventually to be diagnosed as schizophrenia. He had already laid down the outlines of his theory when at the age of 30 he resigned from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suffering from delusions, hallucinations and paranoia. Some of those years, during which he and Alicia were divorced, were spent wandering Europe.
Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 . His work focussed on game theory. When he was approached for a prestigious academic position in Chicago he declined because he said he was in line to become the Emperor of Antarctica.
He was made the subject of Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, which examined Nash's brilliance as well as his struggle with schizophrenia. The condition eased in  his early fifties. Mr Nash joined the faculty at Princeton, and he remarried  Alicia in 2001.
Russell Crowe, who played Nash in the film, tweeted his condolences. He wrote: "Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts." “We helped lift him into daylight. We resurrected him in a way,” Assar Lindbeck, the former chairman of the committee for the Nobel prize in economics, told Sylvia Nasar, whose biography of him formed the basis of the film.