 John Nash — the Princeton game theorist who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics and was portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind — died in a car crash on May 23, along with his wife, Alicia. Probably the best document it contains is a recommendation letter by Richard Duffin, Nash's undergraduate advisor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), to Solomon Lefschetz, a math professor at Princeton, where Nash was applying to grad school: 
 
 The letter was successful.
– Like a strong, simple letter of recommendation? Well it helps if the subject is a genius. Mathematician Richard Duffin wrote a letter to Princeton University for John Forbes Nash, Jr., who became an esteemed mathematician and the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, Mashable reports. Dated Feb. 11, 1948, the letter reads: "This is to recommend John F. Nash, Jr. who has applied for entrance to the graduate college at Princeton. Mr. Nash is 19 years old and is graduating from Carnegie Tech in June. He is a mathematical genius. Yours Sincerely, Richard J. Duffin." The letter was successful, notes Vox, and Nash went on to win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, the Star-Ledger reports. Nash and his wife died in a taxi crash last month, but weren't supposed to be in that taxi.