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Wednesday, November 11, 2026Nov 11

John Nash, ‘A Beautiful Mind’ inspiration, and wife die in N.J. taxi crash

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Nash recovered from his devastating illness, defying a common misconception about schizophrenia and providing the inspiration for Ron Howard’s 2002 Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind,” starring Russell Crowe.

Nash’s Nobel was for a concept he laid out in his doctoral thesis when he was just 21.

The paper was only 27 pages – and “very generously double-spaced,” his friend and Princeton colleague Harold W. Kuhn joked to a Nobel seminar in 1994.

But the implications of what came to be called “the Nash equilibrium” were huge.