Abel Committee mourns over death of famed mathematician John Nash

The committee that recommends the noted Abel Prize in mathematics on Sunday expressed sorrow over the death of renowned Princeton mathematician John Nash, a Nobel and Abel Prizes laureate whose life story inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind."

"All of us involved in the Abel Prize have had an immense pleasure of having contact with him. It is absolutely incomprehensible and tragic that this should happen," Norway's NTB news agency quoted Abel Committee chairman John Rognes as saying.

Nash, 86, and his wife Alicia Nash, 82, were killed in a car accident when they were traveling in a taxi on Saturday in New Jersey, the United States, according to U.S. TV network ABC News.

The Nash couple had just arrived back in the United States from Norway after Nash and Canadian-born American national Louis Nirenberg received the Abel Prize from King Harald V of Norway on Tuesday.

The Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters announced on March 25 that Nash and Nirenberg are named as the joint winners of the Abel Prize for 2015 for their contributions to mathematical sciences.

The two mathematicians won the prize "for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis," according to a press release issued by the academy.

Nash spent his career at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while Nirenberg worked at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, the press release said, adding that even though they did not formally collaborate on any papers, they influenced each other greatly during the 1950s and the results of their work are felt more strongly today than ever before.

Outside mathematics, Nash is best known for a paper he wrote about game theory, the mathematics of decision-making, which ultimately won him the 1994 Nobel Prize for economics and features strongly in the 2001 film about him, A Beautiful Mind.

The Abel prize has been awarded annually since 2003 in memory of the Norwegian mathematics genius Niels Henrik Abel. Endit