Among other accomplishments, he was the first to propose the idea of a loxodrome (a rhumb line), and was the inventor of several measuring devices, including the nonius (from which the Vernier scale was derived), named after his Latin surname.

[6] Little is known about Nunes' early education, life or family background, only that he was born in Alcácer do Sal in Portugal, his origins are possibly Jewish and that his grandchildren spent a few years behind bars after they were accused by the Portuguese Inquisition of professing and secretly practicing Judaism.

[8] This was a new post in the University of Coimbra and it may have been established to provide instruction in the technical requirements for navigation: clearly a topic of great importance in Portugal at this period, when the control of sea trade was the primary source of Portuguese wealth.

[6] It is possible that, while at the University of Coimbra, future astronomer Christopher Clavius attended Pedro Nunes' classes, and was influenced by his works.

[6] Clavius, proponent of the Gregorian Calendar, the greatest figure of the Colégio Romano, the great center of Roman Catholic knowledge of that period, classified Nunes as “supreme mathematical genius".

Pedro Nunes lived in a transition period, during which science was changing from valuing theoretical knowledge (which defined the main role of a scientist/mathematician as commenting on previous authors), to providing experimental data, both as a source of information and as a method of confirming theories.

[10] Accordingly, he not only published works in Latin, at that time science's lingua franca, aiming for an audience of European scholars, but also in Portuguese, and Spanish (Livro de Algebra).

He was the first to understand why a ship maintaining a steady course would not travel along a great circle, the shortest path between two points on Earth, but would instead follow a spiral course, called a loxodrome.

[12] They could find a solution to the problem of the shortest day, but failed to determine its duration, possibly because they got lost in the details of differential calculus which, at that time, had only recently been developed.

Most of Nunes' achievements were possible because of his profound understanding of spherical trigonometry and his ability to transpose Ptolemy's adaptations of Euclidean geometry to it.