ZB ZB
Live now
Start time
Playing for
End time
Listen live
Listen to NAME OF STATION
Up next
Listen live on
ZB

Nobel Prize-winner John Nash dead

Author
AAP ,
Publish Date
Mon, 25 May 2015, 2:46PM
(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

Nobel Prize-winner John Nash dead

Author
AAP ,
Publish Date
Mon, 25 May 2015, 2:46PM

Nobel prize-winning US mathematician John Nash, who inspired the film A Beautiful Mind, has been killed with his wife in New Jersey in a car crash.

Nash, 86, and his 82-year-old wife, Alicia, were riding in a taxi on Saturday when the accident happened, police say.

"The taxi passengers were ejected," Sergeant Gregory Williams said, adding that they were both killed.

The Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician is best known for his contribution to game theory - the study of decision-making - which won him the Nobel economics prize in 1994.

His life story formed the basis of the Oscar-winning 2001 film A Beautiful Mind in which Russell Crowe played the genius, who struggled with mental illness.

"Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts," Crowe said on Twitter.

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.

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

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.

"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.

"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.

Earlier this month, Nash and mathematician Louis Nirenberg received Norway's prestigious Abel Prize for their contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis.

He and his wife were involved in the deadly crash at 4.30pm on the New Jersey Turnpike near the town of Monroe, after their taxi attempted to pass another vehicle, lost control and struck a guard rail and car.

US media reported the couple were possibly not wearing seatbelts.

The taxi driver was airlifted to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

A passenger in the other car was taken to hospital with neck and back pain.

Take your Radio, Podcasts and Music with you