[1] In 1978 he received his doctorate from the University of Cologne with thesis Asymptotic Expansions in the Central Limit Theorem in Banach Spaces under the supervision of Johann Pfanzagl.

[5] His research deals with asymptotic methods, convergence rates and limit theorems in mathematical statistics, Markov processes, stochastic algorithms, probability theory, functional analysis, and spectral distribution in random matrices.

With the introduction of fundamental new methods, he gave a new, effective proof of the Oppenheim conjecture, which was first proved by Grigory Margulis in 1987.

[7][8] Götze was the spokesperson for the DFG Collaborative Research Center's Spektrale Strukturen und Topologische Methoden in der Mathematik (Spectral Structures and Topological Methods in Mathematics).

For his contribution to the establishment of the European Institute for Statistics, Probability, Stochastic Operations Research and its Applications (Eurandom), he was awarded the Order of Orange-Nassau in 2014.