Nobel Laureate Dr. John Forbes Nash, Jr., the mathematican genius that struggled with mental illness for most of his adult life and who was made famous by the movie, A Beautiful Mind, was killed May 23 in a car accident in New Jersey along with his wife, Alicia.
Both had a tempestuous life together because of John's paranoid schizophrenia. They were married in 1957 and divorced in 1963.
Alicia, however, allowed John to stay in their home as a border. Her support led to his gradual recovery from his mental illness and his being awarded the Nobel Prize. They remarried in 2001.
Police reports said driver of the taxi the Nashes were riding in lost control as he tried to overtake another vehicle on the New Jersey Turnpike near Monroe Township and struck a guard rail.
The couple were thrown out of the car on impact and died from their injuries. Media reports said the couple might not have been wearing seat belts.
Nash was 86 while Alicia was 82. The couple lived in Princeton, New Jersey where John Nash was a senior research mathematician at Princeton University. The couple have a son, John Charles Martin Nash, born in 1959. The younger Nash is also a mathematician and is battling schizophrenia.
Russell Crowe, who played Nash in A Beautiful Mind, took to Twitter to pay tribute.
"Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family. An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts", tweeted Crowe.
Ron Howard, who directed A Beautiful Mind, tweeted "RIP Brilliant #NobelPrize winning John Nash & and his remarkable wife Alicia. It was an honor telling part of their story #ABeautifulMind".
The movie was based on a biography of Nash written by Sylvia Nasar with the same title. Jennifer Connelly played the role of Alicia Nash in the movie.
Nash was considered a pioneer in the field of game theory and developed a tool economists and others could apply to competitive situations from trade negotiations to legislative battles, said USA Today.
His works on game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations provided insight into the factors that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories are used in economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, politics and military theory.
He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. In 2015, he was awarded the Abel Prize along with Louis Nirenberg for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations.
In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, an event highlighted in the movie. Nash spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia.
John and Alicia were married in 1957 but divorced in 1963 due to the stress of dealing with his mental illness. Despite their divorce, Alicia remained close to John and let him live in her home. She worked as a computer programmer to support him and their son.
Living with is ex-wife seemed to help him and John learned how to consciously discard his paranoid delusions, said news reports. After 1970, his condition slowly improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s.
The Nashes were married in a Roman Catholic Church despite Nash being an atheist. Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé Nash graduated from MIT. She was a Catholic and a naturalized U.S. citizen from El Salvador.
In the 1990s, Alicia and John resumed their relationship. They remarried in 2001.