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In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the Cartesian mechanical tradition was challenged by another philosophical tradition established by the Cambridge University mathematician Isaac Newton. Where Descartes held that all motions should be explained with respect to the immediate force exerted by corpuscles, Newton chose to describe universal motion with reference to a set of fundamental mathematical principles: his three laws of motion and the law of gravitation, which he introduced in his 1687 work Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.