'Beautiful Mind' mathematician John Nash dies in car crash

American mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Prize laureate whose life story inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind", was killed in a car accident along with his wife in the US state of New Jersey, media reported on Sunday.

The Princeton University math wiz and his wife were killed on Saturday in a taxi-cab crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, nj.com reported citing police.

John Forbes Nash Jr. 86, and Alicia Nash, 82, were travelling south when their taxi driver lost control of his vehicle.

The couple were not wearing seat belts and were thrown out from the car after it crashed into the guardrail, police said. The taxi driver had to be extricated from the wreckage but will survive.

Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994, struggled with paranoid schizophrenia and his life was depicted in the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind", starring Russell Crowe.

Nash was in Norway on Tuesday to receive the Abel Prize -- dubbed the maths Nobel -- from King Harald V for his work, along with longtime colleague Louis Nirenberg, on non-linear partial differential equations.