Mathematician John Nash, Inspiration for 'A Beautiful Mind,' Died in A Car Crash at 86

Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and the inspiration for A Beautiful Mind, John Forbes Nash, died in a car accident with his wife Alicia Nash on May 23 at the ages of 86 and 82, respectively.

The Nashes were traveling in the backseat of a taxi as it lost control going southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike, Saturday. After crashing into a guardrail, the couple was thrown from the car. "It doesn't appear that they were wearing seatbelts," State Police Sgt. Gregory Williams said, notes NJ.com. The taxi driver was flown to a local hospital and is currently suffering non-life-threatening injuries.

Nash struggled from paranoid schizophrenia while his wife remained a strong force by his side, tackling the disorder head on—the two inspired the Academy Award-winning film in which Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly starred. The two quickly become mental health advocates and later had a son, John Charles Nash, who was also diagnosed with schizophrenia.

With a career spent reaching various milestones, Nash taught at both Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the place Nash first exposed signs of schizophrenia. After a ten-year battle with the maddening disease, the mathematician was left with no choice but to resign from MIT and eventually, the Nashes divorced in 1963. They managed, however, to remarry 38 years later. After self-medicating and numerous attempts to control the disease, Nash embarked on his teaching journey at Princeton, contributing life-changing information to the fields of mathematics and game theory, notes Rolling Stone.

In 1978 he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize and in 1994 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Just a week before Nash's passing, he and Louis Nirenberg were awarded a prestigious math award in Norway, the Abel Prize, for "striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis."

Crowe was nominated for an Academy Award following his portrayal of Nash and took to Twitter to display his condolences. "Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts."