{"id":4367,"date":"2015-05-25T10:59:56","date_gmt":"2015-05-25T10:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=4367"},"modified":"2015-05-25T10:59:56","modified_gmt":"2015-05-25T10:59:56","slug":"john-nash-mathematician-who-inspired-a-beautiful-mind-killed-in-car-accident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/john-nash-mathematician-who-inspired-a-beautiful-mind-killed-in-car-accident\/","title":{"rendered":"John Nash, mathematician who inspired A Beautiful Mind, killed in car accident"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash and his wife were killed in a car accident.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner who inspired the movie A Beautiful Mind, was killed in a car crash along with his wife in New Jersey, US police have confirmed.<\/em><\/p>\n

The couple were in a taxi whose driver lost control and crashed into a guard rail at 4:30pm on Saturday (local time) while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.<\/p>\n

“The taxi passengers were ejected,” Sergeant Gregory Williams told AFP.<\/p>\n

Sgt Williams said the crash happened as the taxi driver attempted to pass another car.<\/p>\n

The driver was airlifted to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, while a passenger in the other car suffered neck and back pain.<\/p>\n

The Oscar award-winning film A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe, was loosely based on Nash’s longtime struggle with schizophrenia.<\/p>\n

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Extraordinary life of a beautiful mind<\/a><\/h2>\n

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\nThe author of A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar, talks to NewsRadio about the extraordinary life of Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash.<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Crowe wrote on Twitter that he was stunned by reports of the death of Nash and his wife, Alicia.<\/p>\n

The film’s director Ron Howard also paid tribute to the pair, praising Nash and his wife as “brilliant” and “remarkable” respectively.<\/p>\n

“It was an honor telling part of their story,” he wrote on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Nash, a Princeton University scholar, was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994 for his work on game theory and the mathematics of decision-making.<\/p>\n

In March, Nash received the 2015 Abel Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for his work on partial differential equations, used to describe the basic laws of scientific phenomena.<\/p>\n

The award is one of the most prestigious in mathematics and includes an $800,000 prize.<\/p>\n

Nash was 86 and his wife was 82, and were living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, according to New Jersey police.<\/p>\n

Nash’s ‘achievements inspired generations’<\/h2>\n

Nash was born in Bluefield, West Virginia on June 13, 1928 to John, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Virginia, a former school teacher.<\/p>\n

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He went on to study mathematics at what is now Carnegie Mellon University and received a graduate degree from Princeton, where he said he first became interested in game theory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Nash’s life story took a twist in early 1959 when he began suffering from “mental disturbances” that caused him to resign his faculty position at MIT.<\/p>\n

Eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, Nash faced a lifelong struggle with delusions, which affected his career and marriage to Alicia, whom he wed in 1957.<\/div>\n

The couple would divorce in the early 1960s, but remained in contact and remarried decades later in 2001. By the time Nash received his Nobel Prize, his delusions had decreased.<\/p>\n

“I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation, my situation may be atypical,” Nash wrote in an autobiographical description, published at the time of his Nobel Prize award in 1994.<\/p>\n

“It did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalised that I would finally renounce my delusional hypothesis and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research,” he said.<\/p>\n