A terrible loss.
Driverless cars (taxis) cannot come fast enough!
'A Beautiful Mind' mathematician John Nash, wife killed in taxi crash, police sayBy Myles Ma | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
May 24, 2015 at 8:33 AM, updated May 24, 2015 at 10:45 AM
http://www.nj.com/middlesex/index.ssf/2015/05/famed_a_beautiful_mind_mathematician_wife_killed_in_taxi_crash_police_say.htmlJohn Forbes Nash Jr., the Princeton University mathematician whose life story was the subject of the film "A Beautiful Mind," and his wife of nearly 60 years were killed in a car crash Saturday on the New Jersey Turnpike, police said.
Nash was 86. Alicia Nash was 82. The couple lived in Princeton Junction.
The Nashes were in a taxi traveling southbound in the left lane of the New Jersey Turnpike when the driver of the Ford Crown Victoria lost control as he tried to pass a Chrysler in the center lane, crashing into a guard rail, according to State Police Sgt. Gregory Williams.
The Nashes were ejected from the car, Williams said.
"It doesn't appear that they were wearing seatbets," he said.
The second vehicle also crashed into the guard rail, Williams said. The taxi driver was extricated from the vehicle and flown to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick with non-life-threatening injuries. A passenger in the Chrysler was treated for neck pain.
A spokesman for the Middlesex County Prosecutor's office said no charges were expected to be filed in the case.
Nash, a West Virginia Native, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, the year before he joined the Princeton mathematics department as a senior research mathematician. He is known for his work in game theory and his struggle with paranoid schizophrenia, depicted in the 2001 film, "A Beautiful Mind," starring Russell Crowe.
In a Tweet, Crowe today said he was stunned. "My heart goes out to John &Alicia & family," he wrote. "An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts."
Alicia was his caretaker while he battled his mental illness. They became mental health care advocates when their son John was also diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Mathematical genius
Nash, who grew up in West Virginia, received his bachelor's and graduate degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). He received his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton in 1950.
Named early in his career by Fortune magazine as one of the most promising mathematicians in the world, Nash in 1949 laid the foundations of game theory, the mathematics of decision-making, while in his 20s and his fame grew during his time at Princeton University and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met Alicia Larde, a physics major. They married in 1957.
They were a study in contrasts. He was lanky, lean and eccentric, and often with a sly smile;. Alicia, a San Salvador native who still retained an accent, was always the family anchor.
But by the end of the decade, the voices in his head began to overtake his thoughts on mathematical theory. In his biography, Sylvia Nasar described how he accused one mathematician of entering his office to steal his ideas and began to hear alien messages. She noted that w\hen he was offered a prestigious chair at the University of Chicago, he declined because he was planning to become Emperor of Antarctica.
Quitting his job in 1959, Alicia had him involuntarily committed several times, including twice in New Jersey, at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and Carrier Clinic, creating such a rift in their relationship that they divorced in 1962.
Nash, despite his illness, continued to teach and took research jobs through out the 1960s and '70s, yet returning to take up his old life with his former wife and their son. Alicia, who took a job as a computer programmer for NJ Transit, continued to support both her ex-husband and their son.
Schizophrenia fades
As Nash aged, however, the schizophrenia began receding in the late 1970s and the voices in his head faded. "I had been long enough hospitalized 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, " Nash later wrote for the Nobel autobiography that described his recovery.
Alicia and John remarried at their home in 2001.
Nash was in Norway on Tuesday to receive the Abel Prize for mathematics from King Harald V for his work, along with longtime colleague Louis Nirenberg, on nonlinear partial differential equations.
Reached at his home Sunday, Nirenberg called Nash a "wonderful mathematician" and person. Nirenberg had just flown back from Norway with the couple, and they were taking a taxi back from the airport, he said. Nirenberg had known the couple since the 1950s.
The last time many at Princeton saw Nash was in late March, when the university held a celebration following the announcement that he had won the Abel Prize with Nirenberg.
Nash and his wife had attended the informal campus reception, where colleagues took turns lauding the mathematician. The prize—which came with an $800,000 prize that Nash would split with Nirenberg—was considered the pinnacle of his career.
"The Abel Prize is top-level among mathematics prizes," Nash said in his soft voice at the event, according to an account written by the university's press office. "There's really nothing better."
Though Nash was best known for his work in game theory, the Abel Prize recognized his other groundbreaking work in geometry and partial differential equations.
At the reception, Nash quietly discussed his work with fellow mathematicians and Princeton colleagues, according to those who attended. He wore a suit and an orange tie with a drawing of Princeton's Cleveland Tower, one of the university's landmarks.
"Short of getting the prize myself, there is no one the prize could go to that would make me more happy," Sergiu Klainerman, a Princeton mathematics professor, said during a series of informal speeches at the reception, according to the university's account.
"The prize has redressed a historical anomaly in the public," Klainerman said, referring to the popularity of Nash's game-theory work. "We mathematicians know very well that [Nash] did far deeper work much later. These are the works for which he is finally recognized today by the most prestigious mathematics prize."