Full context:   Newton, an English mathematician and physicist, was a seminal figure in the Scientific Revolution. Drawing on advances made in astronomy by Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler, Newton derived the universal law of gravitation and laws of motion. These laws applied both on Earth and in outer space, uniting two spheres of the physical world previously thought to function independently, according to separate physical rules. Newton, for example, showed that the tides were caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Another of Newton's advances was to make mathematics a powerful explanatory tool for natural phenomena. While natural philosophers had long used mathematics as a means of measurement and analysis, its principles were not used as a means of understanding cause and effect in nature until Newton.