Alicia Nash

Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé Nash (January 1, 1933 – May 23, 2015) was a Salvadoran-American who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and became known primarily for her steadfast support of mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. during his decades-long battle with schizophrenia. Born into a prominent family in San Salvador, El Salvador, where her father was a physician, she met Nash while studying at MIT, where he taught, and married him in 1957. The couple had a son, John Charles Martin Nash, in 1959, who later developed schizophrenia as well, but divorced in 1963 amid Nash's institutionalizations; Alicia continued caring for both her ex-husband and son while working in computer science during an era when women rarely entered the field. They remarried in 1994 following Nash's partial recovery, sharing in the recognition of his 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for game theory contributions, and both perished together in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike while returning from receiving the Abel Prize in Norway.