Nobel Prize winner John Nash - who was played by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind – has been killed in a car crash.

The 86-year-old died alongside his wife, Alicia, 82, when they were thrown from a taxi in New Jersey as the driver lost control at 4:30pm yesterday, American news reported.

The mathematical genius’ struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind,

Russell Crowe, who portrayed Nash in the film, said that he was “stunned”.

Known as brilliant and eccentric, Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994 for his work in game theory, which offered insight into the dynamics of human rivalry. It is considered one of the most influential ideas of the 20th century.

Just a few days ago, Nash had received a prize from the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in Oslo with New York University mathematician Louis Nirenberg, who said he’d chatted with the couple for an hour at the airport in Newark before they’d taken a cab.

Nirenberg said Nash was a truly great mathematician and “a kind of genius”.

Some of the world’s leading academics also paid tribute. Indian scientist APJ Abdul Kalam was one of them.

People on Twitter remembered him as they do best, with inspiring quotes.

A Beautiful Mind won four Oscars, including best picture and best director, and generated interest in John Nash’s life story. The film was based on an unauthorised biography by Sylvia Nasar, who wrote that Nash’s contemporaries found him “immensely strange” and “slightly cold, a bit superior, somewhat secretive”.

Much of his demeanour is likely to have stemmed from mental illness, which began emerging in 1959 when Alicia was pregnant with a son. The film, though, did not mention Nash’s older son or the years that he and Alicia spent living together after divorcing. The couple split in 1963, then resumed living together several years later and finally remarried in 2001.