Things you need to know about Mathematician John Nash

Nobel-winning American mathematician John Forbes Nash, whose life story was turned into Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, died in a car crash.

Nash is famous for his work in game theory. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. In the award-winning film, Nash's breakthroughs in mathematics and his fight against schizophrenia were the focus.

Below are the things you need to know about John Nash

• John F. Nash, Jr. was born June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia.

• At age 22, he published his influential thesis "Non-cooperative Games" in the journal Annals of Mathematics.

• His recommendation letter contained just one line: "This man is a genius."

• He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, but resigned in the late 1950s.

• Nash married Alicia Larde in 1957, after publishing some of his breakthrough works in game theory, which is the mathematical study of decision-making.

• In 1994, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his landmark work on the mathematics of game theory.

• His struggles with mental illness and recovery were the subject of the Academy Award-winning biopic A Beautiful Mind (2001), directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.

• Nash's famous equilibrium has grown to be perhaps the most important idea in economic analysis and has found application in fields as diverse as computing, evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence.

• John Nash and Louis Nirenberg received the 2015 Abel Prize at the award ceremony in Oslo on 19 May. They received the prize "for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis.

• On May 23, 2015, Nash and his wife died when a taxi they were riding in lost control and crashed on the New Jersey Turnpike. He was 86.