Jeffrey Goldstone’s early research was on theoretical nuclear physics. He showed how Feynman diagrams could be used to analyse systems of many fermions. His studies of spontaneously broken symmetry in relativistic quantum field theory, led to his best known discovery, the Nambu–Goldstone boson.

His other influential work was on the classical and quantum dynamics of a massless relativistic string and on quantum solitons. In the last 15 years, his main interest has been in algorithms for quantum computers. Jeffrey’s papers on the quantum adiabatic algorithm and on an algorithm for the NAND tree have stimulated much further research.

Jeffrey became a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977, and an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 2000. He has received the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Physical Society, the Guthrie Medal of the Institute of Physics, and the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics.