Princeton honoring memory of mathematician John Nash

Five months after his remarkable life ended in a crash on a New Jersey highway, Princeton University on Saturday will pay tribute to John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician remembered by colleagues for his brilliance and by millions for the Hollywood movie about him.

The Ivy League school will hold a day of academic panels and remembrance events to honor John Nash, whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in 2001's "A Beautiful Mind." Nash and his wife, Alicia, were killed in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike in late May.

The couple was returning home from Oslo, Norway, where John Nash had received the 2015 Abel Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, one of the most prestigious honors in mathematics. The prize recognized his seminal work in partial differential equations, which are used to describe the basic laws of scientific phenomena.

Among the day's feature events is a public lecture by Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the biography on which the movie starring Russell Crowe as Nash was based. Nash's relatives and colleagues will also gather at 6 p.m. at the University Chapel for a public event to honor Nash's life and his long connection to the school.

Nash had a long connection with the university, receiving his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton in 1950 after he got his graduate and bachelor's degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1948. The 1994 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Nash had held the position of senior research mathematician at Princeton since 1995 and was renowned for his work in game theory.

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