His parents, Gad and Rachel Raya Goldberg, immigrated from Poland and Lithuania to Palestine shortly after Hitler became Germany's chancellor in 1933.

After completing his undergraduate studies, Goldberg served in the Israel Defense Forces for three years.

Released at the rank of captain, he resumed his studies, earning his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 1973 under the supervision of Saul Abarbanel.

[1] After a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Goldberg joined the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1979, and in due course became the Ruth and Samuel Jaffe Professor of Mathematics.

He then turned to other topics, including numerical analysis of hyperbolic and parabolic partial differential systems, linear and Multilinear algebra, matrix and operator theory, functional analysis, and various types of algebras.