Walter Gordon was the son of businessman Arnold Gordon and his wife Bianca Gordon (
nee Brann). The family moved to Switzerland in his early years. In 1900, he attended school in
St. Gallen and in 1915 he began his studies of
mathematics and
physics at
University of Berlin. He received his doctoral degree in 1921 from
Max Planck. In 1922, while still at the University of Berlin, Gordon became the assistant of
Max von Laue. In 1925, he worked for some months in
Manchester with
William Lawrence Bragg and later, at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Society for fiber chemistry in Berlin. In 1926, he moved to
Hamburg, where he attained the
habilitation in 1929. In 1930, he became a
professor. He married a local Hamburg woman, Gertrud Lobbenberg, in 1932. He moved to
Stockholm in 1933 because of the political situation in Germany. While at the
university, he worked on
mechanics and
mathematical physics. He died on 24 December 1939 of stomach cancer. ==Notable works==