John F. Nash Jr., the brilliant but troubled mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in the 2001 motion picture "A Beautiful Mind," has been awarded the prestigious Abel Prize in mathematics, along with another American mathematician, Louis Nirenberg.
The announcement was made on Wednesday by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which called the men "two mathematical giants of the twentieth century" and said the prize recognized their "striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis.”
Nash, 86, spent his career at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the academy. Nirenberg, 90, worked at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Nash was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for economics for a paper about game theory.
The pair never collaborated on a paper but worked together informally in the 1950s, New Scientist reported.
The annual 6 million kroner ($820,000) award will be presented in Oslo on May 19, the Associated Press reported.