John Nash died yesterday

[Viking]

We lost one of the greatest minds of all time yesterday. As someone who deals in partial differential equations every second of every working day, he was a god. His work is the basis of our software and everything we do. We lost one of the greats in the history of humankind to a taxi accident yesterday on the NJ Turnpike. Life is not fair.

[NorthwestUteFan]

What a tragic end to a phenomenal person. Very sad that such an astonishingly brilliant person could be snuffed out like that.

For those who don't know, John Forbes Nash, Jr. was the subject of the book and movie, 'A Beautiful Mind'. He shared the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994, and just last week he was awarded the Abel Prize for Mathematics by King Harald of Norway (he was riding home from the airport when he was killed in the taxi accident).

His Abel Prize citation stated, "for his striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applicability to geometric analysis".

He likely should have won a Fields Medal as well.

Sadly he may be remembered more for his decades-long struggles with mental illness than for his Euler-esque contributions to mathematics. But all of us benefit from the discoveries which were made possible by his contributions to our body of knowledge.