John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who became a celebrity outside the academic world when Russell Crowe portrayed him in the movie A Beautiful Mind, died in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike on Saturday, NJ.com reports.
Forbes was 86. His wife of nearly 60 years, Alicia Nash, 82, was also killed when the taxi they were riding in lost control and struck a guardrail as the driver tried to pass another vehicle in the center lane. The driver was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries.
The Princeton University mathematician won the Nobel in economics for a paper on game theory in 1993, and had been with Princeton University mathematics department since 1994.
A Beautiful Mind won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2002 and Crowe was nominated for Best Actor for his portrayal of the brilliant professor who also struggled with paranoid schizophrenia.
