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An Anonymous Coward writes:

John Nash, the mathematician credited with foundational work in the field of game theory, has died. The 86-year old and his wife Alicia were passengers in a taxi when the driver lost control of the vehicle on the New Jersey Turnpike, killing both. Apparently neither Nash nor his wife were wearing seat belts, since both were ejected from the car after it slammed into a guard rail, according to NJ state police.

Nash struggled with paranoid schizophrenia throughout his adult life, and was admitted to psychiatric hospitals multiple times. The tragedy of a great mathematician battling such an unpredictable ailment was profiled in Sylvia Nasar's book "A Beautiful Mind", which was made into a rather fanciful Hollywood movie by Ron Howard, starring Russell Crowe as Nash. Nash was amused by the film.

As depicted in the film, Alicia Nash met her husband when she was a student at MIT enrolled in Nash's advanced calculus class (in the film, Prof. Nash is given the assignment to teach the class as he enters the classroom building; Nash's first move was to dump the 'Calculus of Several Variables' textbook he has been handed into the waste basket). They married in 1957. Alicia Nash filed for divorce a few years later, but continued to care for Prof. Nash for decades; they remarried in 2001.