JOHN NASH, THE Nobel Prize winning mathematician whose life was the subject of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, has been killed in a car crash.

Nash and his wife Alicia were killed when the driver of the taxi they were in lost control on the New Jersey Turnpike last night. Nash was 86, Alicia was 82.

The couple lived in Princeton, New Jersey, close to where Nash worked as a lecturer in Princeton University.

He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, before his life story and his battles with paranoid schizophrenia were portrayed in A Beautiful Mind.

Russell Crowe, who was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Nash, tweeted his shock at the news.

Nash had just returned from Norway, where he picked up the Abel Prize for mathematics for his work on partial differential equations.

He was known for his contributions to game theory, algebraic geometry and parabolic differential equations.

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