Gordon studied for his PhD degree at University of Edinburgh, supervised by Rod Burstall, finishing in 1973 with a thesis entitled Evaluation and Denotation of Pure LISP Programs.

He was invited to Stanford University in California by John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP, to work in his Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there.

Gordon worked at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory from 1981, initially as a lecturer, promoted to Reader in 1988 and Professor in 1996.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994,[5] and in 2008 a two-day research meeting on Tools and Techniques for Verification of System Infrastructure was held there in honour of his 60th birthday.

[6] Mike Gordon was married to Avra Cohn, a PhD student of Robin Milner at the University of Edinburgh, and they undertook research together.