John Forbes Nash, Jr., 86, and his wife, Alicia, 82, were killed in a traffic accident in New Jersey on May 23, on the final leg of their journey home from Norway where he had just received the 2015 Abel Prize along with Louis Nirenberg for their work in nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis.“We at the American Mathematical Society join our colleagues and friends all over the world in expressing our deep sorrow over the tragic passing of John and Alicia Nash, and we send our most heartfelt condolences to their family. Their lives have enriched and touched us all, both by the beauty of his mathematical ideas and by their inspiring dedication to family and the cause of alleviating the suffering due to mental illness, overcoming adversity with grace and compassion,” says AMS president Robert Bryant.

In addition to the Abel Prize, Nash also won the Nobel Prize in 1994 for his work in non-cooperative games, and did groundbreaking work on algebraic manifolds and on the embedding problem. He was in the inaugural class of Fellows of the AMS. His life and work were the subject of the book and movie A Beautiful Mind. Mathematicians and news outlets around the world responded with shock and praise for Nash--and for Alicia and his extended family of colleagues, who had stood by him through the most difficult periods of his life when his mental illness, schizophrenia, was at its most disabling.