Nobel Prize winner John F. Nash Jr., aged 86, and his 82-year-old wife Alicia were killed after their car collided head-on with an oncoming vehicle on the New Jersey Turnpike on Sunday.
Born in 1928 in West Virginia, Nash is best known for the Nash Equilibrium, a 27-page thesis on the subject of game theory that won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences in 1994.
Nash also did ground-breaking work in the area of real algebraic geometry. His work in mathematics includes the Nash Embedding Theorem, the Nash Functions and the Nash-Moser Theorem.
The subject of the 2001 Oscar-winning biopic, A Beautiful Mind , Nash had a long history of mental illness and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
In 1994, he wrote in his Nobel autobiography: "I spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release. And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalised that I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research."
In 1978, he was awarded the John von Neumann Theory prize for the Nash Equilibrium.
In March 2015, he >won the Abel Prize for Mathematics , an award considered on a par with the Nobel.
