Johannes Schöner

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Portrait of Magdeburg theologian Dr Johannes Schöner, 1529.
'Joan Schonerus Mathematicus'

Johannes Schöner (16 January 1477, in

Nürnberg
in 1543.

Life

Early life

Schöner was born on 16 January 1477 in

Bishopric of Bamberg on 13 June 1500. On 2 February 1500 he moved to Bamberg and was appointed chaplain in Hallstatt
near Bamberg on 18 April 1500. His next appointment was as vicar in his hometown Karlstadt from 4 June 1504. Between 4 May and 29 October 1506 he was again in Bamberg before he returned to Karlstadt. His diary also informs us that he entered a relationship with Kunigunde Holocher in 1499, with whom he had three children: a son Johannes born on 1 February 1502, a daughter Sibilla born on 12 June 1503 and a second son Vitus born on 21 November 1504.

A facsimile copy of Schöner's Waldseemüller map at the Library of Congress in Washington

Schöner was the owner of the only specimen of the 1507 Waldseemüller map of the world that has survived and which was rediscovered at Schloss Wolfegg in Upper Swabia in 1901. Since 2003 it is in possession of the Library of Congress.[2]

Bamberg

Algorithmus demonstratus, 1534

No diary exists after 1506, and up to 1515 there are only indirect traces of Schöner's existence in the financial records of the bishopric and in the correspondence of Lorenz Beheim (?1457 - 1521), who after 24 years in Rome as chamberlain to Pope Alexander IV had returned to Bamberg in 1505 as a canon of the cathedral.

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. At the same time, he converted to Protestantism and married.

Already in Bamberg, he owned his own printing company and published many maps and globes. He produced the first ever printed celestial globe in his workshop in 1517, as a matching pair to his printed terrestrial globe from 1515. He made another globe in 1520.

Western hemisphere of the Schöner globe from 1520.

Schöner had also made still unpublished data of

De revolutionibus
", giving only longitudes, and falsely attributing them to Schöner. The values differed slightly from the ones published by Schöner in 1544.

In 1538,

Narratio prima, to Schöner, to test the waters of the reaction by the Catholic Church
. As this was well received, Copernicus finally agreed to publish his main work, and Rheticus prepared Copernicus' manuscript for printing.

In Nürnberg, Schöner published in 1544 the astronomical observations of Regiomontanus and Walther, as well as manuscripts of Regiomontanus, which had been in the hand of Walther, as Observationes XXX annorum a I. Regiomontano et B. Walthero Norimbergae habitae, [4°, Norimb. 1544].

A crater on Mars is named in his honor.

See also

References

Further reading

External links

From the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress: