Gordon Williams was born in Cambridge, England in 1969. He and his family moved to the United States soon thereafter. They lived in a variety of places in Ohio and Michigan before moving to Anchorage, Alaska in 1981. In 1982 he started attending Steller Alternative Secondary School, which seeks to provide an environment more amenable to students that exhibit a significant amount of self-motivation towards their own education. After graduating in 1988, he did an internship at the Smithsonian Institution's Insect Zoo, and then spent a year as a foreign exchange student in Kumamoto, Japan.
In the fall of 1989 Gordon started at Hampshire College where he initially intended to pursue physics, but eventually made the switch to mathematics. His Div III project (sort of like an honor's thesis) was about elliptic curves and public key cryptography. Between college and graduate school Gordon spent two years in industry in Alaska.
Returning to the Amherst area, Gordon pursued a Master's degree at the University of Massachussettes at Amherst, and then moved west to complete his Ph.D at the University of Washington under the tutelage of Branko Grünbaum. His thesis was on Petrie schemes, an extension of the notion of a Petrie polygon he came up with while working on some questions connected to Petrie polygons in the study of the combinatorial properties of polytopes.
On July 5, 2002, Gordon married Leah Berman and after a brief honeymoon started packing their things for the move east to Pennsylvania where they had both found jobs.
Starting in the fall of 2002 Gordon started teaching at Moravian College, where he worked until summer of 2005. In the fall of 2005 Gordon joined the faculty at Ursinus College, where he remains to this day.