'Beautiful Mind' mathematician John Nash, wife, killed in crash

John Forbes Nash Jr. is shown in this March 24, 2002 photo at the 74th annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles. (AP / Laura Rauch)

TRENTON, N.J. - The Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 movie "A Beautiful Mind" has died in a car crash along with his wife in New Jersey. John Forbes Nash Jr. was 86.

Police say John and Alicia Nash were killed in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike on Saturday. A colleague who had accepted an award with Nash in Norway says the couple had taken a taxi from the Newark airport.

John Nash spent much of his career at Princeton University. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994 for his work in game theory, which offered insight into the dynamics of human rivalry.

Nash received a prize last week with New York University mathematician Louis Nirenberg. Nirenberg says Nash was a truly great mathematician and "a kind of genius."