“Most widely lauded in later popular imagination, however, was Cambridge-based mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, whose classic works, the Principia (1687) and Opticks (1709), underpinned the marriage of mathematics with astronomy. Fundamentally, Newton presented the world with a rational, well-regulated cosmological system; from the analysis of observed facts he seemed to impose order and regularity with general principles such as the three laws of motion and the principle of universal gravity.