John Nash 1928 - 2015

English: John Forbes Nash, American mathematician and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics 1994, at a symposium of game theory at the university of Cologne, Germany (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The American mathematician John Nash has died in a car crash with his wife, police have said. Nash is most famous for winning a Nobel prize in 1994 and for being played by Russell Crowe in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind.

John Nash was 86. He and his 82-year-old wife Alicia were killed when their taxi crashed in New Jersey. Police said they were thrown from their vehicle and media reports suggested the couple may not have been wearing seatbelts.

Nash is renowned for his work in game theory, the mathematical study of decision-making, which won him the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994.

Nash married Alicia Larde in 1957. Alicia committed her husband for psychiatric care several times after the onset of severe schizophrenia. The couple divorced in 1962, but they remained close, and with Nash's condition improving by the 1980s, they remarried in 2001. Alicia Nash helped care for her husband, and the two later became prominent mental health advocates.

John Nash's work in the field of game theory, and his struggles with schizophrenia, were the focus of the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind.

Nash Equilibrium, named after the mathematician's work in game theory, has become a concept used in a wide variety of disciplines including chiefly economic analysis, but also computing, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence. This is the basis of the work that led to the Nobel prize.