The Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind has died in a car crash 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 yesterday. 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."

He was played by Russell Crowe in the Oscar-winning film.