[1] Yandell was a mathematical boy-genius who, after graduating from Stanford Phi Beta Kappa with departmental honors in mathematics, chose to become a poet and worked as a TV repairman in South Central LA.
[3]On 26 August 1974, he married Janet Alaine Nippell (born 1951), who was for some years on the editorial staff of the Los Angeles Times.
After ten years of work, Yandell's completed his book “The Honors Class: Hilbert’s Problems and Their Solvers”, published in 2002.
[1][4] The distinguished mathematician Hermann Weyl, who was one of Hilbert’s students, had dubbed the Hilbert problem-solvers “the honors class of the mathematical community.”[1]Yandell's book is part of a huge literature on Hilbert's problems and is somewhat unusual in the emphasis it puts on the lives of mathematicians instead of the mathematics itself.
[5]Upon his death he was survived by his wife and their daughter, Kate Louise Yandell (born 1988), who is a science writer dealing with biology.