John Nash, who inspired A Beautiful Mind, killed in freak accident.

Mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner who inspired the movie A Beautiful Mind, was killed in a car crash along with his wife in New Jersey, US police have confirmed.

The couple were in a taxi whose driver lost control and crashed into a guard rail at 4:30pm on Saturday (local time) while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.

“The taxi passengers were ejected,” Sergeant Gregory Williams told AFP.

Sgt Williams said the crash happened as the taxi driver attempted to pass another car.

Crowe wrote on Twitter that he was stunned by reports of the death of Nash and his wife, Alicia.

The film's director Ron Howard also paid tribute to the pair, praising Nash and his wife as "brilliant" and "remarkable" respectively.

"It was an honor telling part of their story," he wrote on Twitter.

Nash, a Princeton University scholar, was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994 for his work on game theory and the mathematics of decision-making.

In March, Nash received the 2015 Abel Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for his work on partial differential equations, used to describe the basic laws of scientific phenomena.

The award is one of the most prestigious in mathematics and includes an $800,000 prize.

Nash was 86 and his wife was 82, and were living in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, according to New Jersey police.

Nash's 'achievements inspired generations'

Nash was born in Bluefield, West Virginia on June 13, 1928 to John, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Virginia, a former school teacher.

He went on to study mathematics at what is now Carnegie Mellon University and received a graduate degree from Princeton, where he said he first became interested in game theory.

Nash's life story took a twist in early 1959 when he began suffering from "mental disturbances" that caused him to resign his faculty position at MIT.

Eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia, Nash faced a lifelong struggle with delusions, which affected his career and marriage to Alicia, whom he wed in 1957.

The couple would divorce in the early 1960s, but remained in contact and remarried decades later in 2001. By the time Nash received his Nobel Prize, his delusions had decreased.

"I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation, my situation may be atypical," Nash wrote in an autobiographical description, published at the time of his Nobel Prize award in 1994.

"It did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalised that I would finally renounce my delusional hypothesis and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research," he said.

Earlier this month, Nash and mathematician Louis Nirenberg received Norway's prestigious Abel Prize for their contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) and its applications to geometric analysis.

"John's remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant, groundbreaking work in game theory," Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber said on Twitter.

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis tweeted of Nash that "reading your work was inspirational. Meeting you, and spending time together, was an unearned bonus. Farewell John Nash Jr."

This article originally appeared on the ABC and was republished here with full permission.