In a crash on a busy stretch of US motorway, John Nash, the Nobel Laureate, died with his wife Alicia Nash. His life as both a genius mathematician and a victim of cruel mental disorders inspired the 2001 film ‘A Beautiful Mind’.

Nash was as significant a figure in mathematics as one could get. He has contributed a lot in the fields of math and economics. All his contributions are regarded as some of the most important of the previous hundred years.

Princeton University’s president Christopher L. Eisgruber said they were stunned and saddened by the news of the untimely death of John Nash and his wife and great champion, Alicia. Nash was 86 years old and his wife was 82.

One of the colleagues who had accepted an award with Nash in Norway said the couple took a taxi from the Newark airport.

As per a police source cited by ABC news, Nash and his wife were riding in a taxi when it hit a guard rail. The cab driver was hospitalized.

In the 1950s, Nash used to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and held a research post at Brandeis University before returning to Princeton eventually.

At the age of 30, Nash had already laid down the outlines of his theory when he resigned from Massachusetts Institute of Technology after suffering from delusions, hallucinations and paranoia.

Since long, he was affiliated with Princeton University where in 1950 he received his doctorate. As of this weekend, he was still on the list of faculty.

It appeared that much of his demeanor stemmed from mental illness, which started emerging in 1959, the time when Alicia was pregnant with a son. But there were huge implications of what came to be known as ‘the Nash equilibrium’.

The biographical drama film directed by Ron Howard was inspired by a 1998 book of the same name by Sylvia Nasar.