It is best to refer to him using the usual 16th-century Latin term "mathematicus", as the areas of study to which he devoted his life were very different from those now considered to be the domain of the mathematician.

In his own time he enjoyed a Europe-wide reputation as an innovative and influential globe maker and cosmographer and as one of the continent's leading and most authoritative astrologers.

[1] Today he is remembered as an influential pioneer in the history of globe making, and as a man who played a significant role in the events that led up to the publishing of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres' in the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg in 1543.

Quite detailed information for Schöner's adult life, at least up to 1506, has been preserved in his own marginalia in his copy of Regiomontanus' printed Ephemerides, which he used as a diary.

In 1526, he was called to Nürnberg, by Philip Melanchthon, as the first professor of mathematics at the newly founded gymnasium Aegidianum, a post he held till one year prior to his death.

In 1540, Rheticus dedicated the first published report of Copernicus work, the Narratio prima, to Schöner, to test the waters of the reaction by the Catholic Church.