Timothy Gowers was born in Marlborough, UK, in 1963. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University, where he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Béla Bollobás. After two years as Research Fellow at Trinity College (Cambridge), he became Senior Lecturer at University College London, before returning to Cambridge in 1995, first as Senior Lecturer, then from 1998 as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics. He was a visiting professor at Princeton between 2000 and 2002.

Since 2009, Timothy Gowers has been Research Professor of the Royal Society. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he is laureate of the Fondation Sciences mathématiques de Paris chair. He received a prize from the European Mathematical Society in 1996, and a Fields Medal in 1998. In 2012, he was knighted in the Order of the British Empire for services to mathematics. He is the author of Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction, and the principal editor of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics.

He was appointed Professor at the Collège de France in May 2020 in the Combinatorics chair, and in 2021 gave his first lecture entitled " Outils de la combinatorics ".