"I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logic or reasons can be found. I'm only here tonight because of you."

Russell Crowe’s romantic odes to an equally besotted Jennifer Connelly are but a few of the lines that helped director Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind sweep the Academy Awards in 2002. Based on the Pulitzer Prize nominated book by Sylvia Nasar, the film highlighted the academic genius, mental turmoil and vulnerable heart of one of the greatest mathematicians of our time: John Nash.

The words, however, have now become an elegiac echo, following the news that both Nash and his wife, Alicia, passed away on May 23rd 2015 following a car crash in New York. Nash had just received the Abel prize in Norway, one of many awards – including the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences – with which he had been wreathed, and, indeed, one of many recognitions of his mathematical genius. One such acknowledgement included his professor's legendary one-sentence recommendation letter that accompanied Nash’s application to Princeton’s Graduate school: "This man is a genius".

Whilst famed for his contributions to game theory, he is more familiar to the world as the subject of Howard’s film, etched and gilded into the modern consciousness through Crowe’s West Virginian drawl and his clean-cut confidence that descends into dishevelled chaos as schizophrenia takes hold. The relationship between Nash and Alicia forms the film’s foundation. Whilst it was portrayed with all the tropes of the archetypal Hollywood romance – overly sentimental lines, staring at the stars, 'it’s us against the world’ mentality – it was significantly more tempestuous in reality.

Alicia divorced Nash in 1962, citing his resentment towards her for committing him to a mental institution, and only reconciled with him many years later by taking him in as her ‘boarder’. She nursed him in his remission, and is credited with saving his life; they remarried after he won the Nobel Prize, and seemed to achieve the Hollywood ending before their tragic deaths. Indeed, the film tore a hole in Nash’s own biography in order to envision him as the enigmatic, troubled hero: his homosexual tendencies were omitted, as was his illegitimate son with a nurse in his youth whom he abandoned upon hearing of her pregnancy, and with whom he refused to be associated, allegedly due to her inferior status.

These omissions do not seem to matter, however, when compared to the overarching commercial success of the film on a global scale. It garnered praise from critics and the common man alike, yet most significantly, pushed to the forefront the public misconceptions regarding schizophrenia and mental illness in general. Rather than portraying a monster in a straitjacket, Nash was depicted as all too human, the genius and achievement of a man tragically shadowed by paranoia and hallucination. It presented the devastating impact of mental illness not only upon the sufferer, but upon those surrounding them.

Connelly’s frustrated, despairing Alicia bites at the bitter reality of a family member, friend and colleague trying to understand, earning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in the process. Even the field of mathematics praised the intentions of the film – mathematicians were consulted throughout production on the equations seen and on the creative process behind such formulas – and, for once, almost made maths seem cool.

 Howard’s A Beautiful Mind can be sappy at times. It oversimplifies the Nash Equilibrium and downplays Alicia’s own fierce intelligence compared to her husband’s, but it should nonetheless be celebrated. It has single-handedly created a legacy for Nash in the public sphere by telling his story, or rather, the ‘spirit’ of his story, to an audience that otherwise may never have been made aware of him.